The heterogeneity of cognitive profiles among psychiatric patients has been reported to carry significant clinical information. However, how to best characterize such cognitive heterogeneity is still a matter of debate. Despite being well suited for clinical data, cluster analysis techniques, like the Two-Step and the Latent Class, received little to no attention in the literature. The present study aimed to test the validity of the cluster solutions obtained with Two-Step and Latent Class cluster analysis on the cognitive profile of a cross-diagnostic sample of 387 psychiatric inpatients. Two-Step and Latent Class cluster analysis produced similar and reliable solutions. The overall results reported that it is possible to group all psychiatric inpatients into Low and High Cognitive Profiles, with a higher degree of cognitive heterogeneity in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder patients than in depressive disorders and personality disorder patients.

Concepts allow us to make sense of the world. Most evidence on their acquisition and representation comes from studies of single decontextualized words and focuses on the opposition between concrete and abstract concepts (e.g., “bottle” vs. “truth”). A significant step forward in research on concepts consists in investigating them in online interaction during their use. Our study examines linguistic exchanges analyzing the differences between sub-kinds of concepts. Participants were submitted to an online task in which they had to simulate a conversational exchange by responding to sentences involving sub-kinds of concrete (tools, animals, food) and abstract concepts (PS, philosophical-spiritual; EMSS, emotional-social, PSTQ, physical-spatio-temporal-quantitative). We found differences in content: foods evoked interoception; tools and animals elicited materials, spatial, auditive features, confirming their sensorimotor grounding. PS and EMSS yielded inner experiences (e.g., emotions, cognitive states, introspections) and opposed PSTQ, tied to visual properties and concrete agency. More crucially, the various concepts elicited different interactional dynamics: more abstract concepts generated higher uncertainty and more interactive exchanges than concrete ones. Investigating concepts in situated interactions opens new possibilities for studying conceptual knowledge and its pragmatic and social aspects.

How to correctly interpret interaction effects has been largely discussed in scientific literature. Nevertheless, misinterpretations are still frequently observed, and neuroscience is not exempt from this trend. We reviewed 645 papers published from 2019 to 2020 and found that, in the 93.2% of studies reporting a statistically significant interaction effect (N = 221), post-hoc pairwise comparisons were the designated method adopted to interpret its results. Given the widespread use of this approach, we aim to: (1) highlight its limitations and how it can lead to misinterpretations of the interaction effect; (2) discuss more effective and powerful ways to correctly interpret interaction effects, including both explorative and model selection procedures. The paper provides practical examples and freely accessible online materials to reproduce all analyses.

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Compared to concrete concepts, like “book”, abstract concepts expressed by words like “justice” are more detached from sensorial experiences, even though they are also grounded in sensorial modalities. Abstract concepts lack a single object as referent and are characterized by higher variability both within and across participants. According to the Word as Social Tool (WAT) proposal, owing to their complexity, abstract concepts need to be processed with the help of inner language. Inner language can namely help participants to re-explain to themselves the meaning of the word, to keep information active in working memory, and to prepare themselves to ask information from more competent people. While previous studies have demonstrated that the mouth is involved during abstract concepts’ processing, both the functional role and the mechanisms underlying this involvement still need to be clarified. We report an experiment in which participants were required to evaluate whether 78 words were abstract or concrete by pressing two different pedals. During the judgment task, they were submitted, in different blocks, to a baseline, an articulatory suppression, and a manipulation condition. In the last two conditions, they had to repeat a syllable continually and to manipulate a softball with their dominant hand. Results showed that articulatory suppression slowed down the processing of abstract more than that of concrete words. Overall results confirm the WAT proposal’s hypothesis that abstract concepts processing involves the mouth motor system and specifically inner speech. We discuss the implications for current theories of conceptual representation.