I’m hoping to keep a record of some interesting null results and/or projects that hit a dead end, here. There are more to come! Email me if you’d like more detail on any of these!

Effect of Motor Interference on Sound Symbolism

This was one of the first projects that Dr. Pexman and I worked on. The idea was to see if interfering with motor simulation while a participant reads nonwords will reduce the maluma/takete effect. The inference would then be that articulatory experience is key to the effect. In the video below, I describe our initial results in a Three Minute Thesis. However, we later failed to replicate the effect.

Does Graspability Affect Perceptions of Understandability?

In this project, Dr. Pexman and I examined the conceptual metaphor that understanding = grasping. We wanted to see if concepts would be judged as easier to understand if they were more “graspable”: presented in front of a person’s palm instead of behind their hand. While we found initial results to support this idea, we failed to replicate the effect. These are slides from a talk I gave on this project at the Embodied and Situated Language Processing conference in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in 2014.

Effect of Precision vs Power Grip on Construal Level

This was a project that Dr. Pexman and I did to see if a precision vs. a power grip can influence how visual stimuli are construed. This poster was presented at the Embodied and Situated Language Processing conference in Lyon, France, in 2015.