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The influence of music on lexical decision-making in adolescents

Fisher et al. | Apr 28, 2024

The influence of music on lexical decision-making in adolescents

The lexical decision task is designed to test aspects of vocabulary retrieval from short-term and long-term memory by prompting the subject to differentiate between words and non-words. From this task, researchers can determine the effects of certain stimuli on linguistic processing. Numerous studies have investigated the effects of music on various cognitive capacities, like memory and vocabulary. In the current study, we hypothesized that participants would show greater accuracy rates on the lexical decision task when exposed to a selected piece of classical music while completing the task, as compared to completing the task in silence. We tested this hypothesis on a group of 25 participants who completed the lexical decision task once in silence and once while listening to Beethoven's “Moonlight Sonata, 1st Movement”. The results suggest a positive association between the effects of classical background music and improved accuracy. Our results indicate that listening to certain types of music may enhance linguistic processes such as reading and writing. Further research with a larger group of participants is necessary to better understand the association between music and linguistic processing abilities.

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Reimagize – a digital card-based roleplaying game to improve adolescent girls’ body image

Kumar et al. | Oct 04, 2021

Reimagize – a digital card-based roleplaying game to improve adolescent girls’ body image

Reimagize, a role-playing with decision-making, was conjured, implementing social psychological concepts like counter-stereotyping and perspective-taking. As the game works implicitly to influence body image, it even counters image issues beyond personal body dissatisfaction. This study explored whether a digital role-playing card game, incorporating some of the most common prejudices of body image (like size prejudice, prejudices from the media, etc.) as identified by a digital survey/questionnaire completed by Indian girls aged 11-21, could counter these issues and reduce personal body dissatisfaction.

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A Crossover Study Comparing the Effect of a Processed vs. Unprocessed Diet on the Spatial Learning Ability of Zebrafish

Banga et al. | Sep 18, 2022

A Crossover Study Comparing the Effect of a Processed vs. Unprocessed Diet on the Spatial Learning Ability of Zebrafish

The authors compared the short-term effects of processed versus unprocessed food on spatial learning and survival in zebrafish, given the large public concern regarding processed foods. By randomly assigning zebrafish to a diet of brine shrimp flakes (processed) or live brine shrimp (unprocessed), the authors show while there is no immediate effect on a fish's decision process between the two diets, there are significant correlations between improved learning and stress response with the unprocessed diet.

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Innovative fake health news detection: Integrating emotional features into graph neural networks

Wang et al. | Jul 03, 2026

Innovative fake health news detection: Integrating emotional features into graph neural networks
Image credit: Wang and Wang

This manuscript tackles a major social issue in the health news sector, with social media being one of the primary sources of information and a prime spot to propagate fake news. The author proposes X-HND , which is a unique architecture that combines emotional and contextual analysis in a Graph Neural Network to accurately detect fake news. This was a multi-step process which involved the creation of a custom health news dataset (HNDataset), and an emotional variant that uses RoBERTa to extract emotion. These dataset were then used to prove the hypothesis that accuracy increases when the custom dataset is used to train the model and that with the integration of emotion capture, the detection accuracy increases further.

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