Background Lockdowns imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted the living and working habits of millions of people, with potentially important implications for their physical, mental, and social well-being. Objective The primary objective of this study was to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on remote workers who were not directly affected by COVID-19. Methods This was a correlational cross-sectional study (with an additional qualitative component) of 184 remote workers surveyed during the first COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom. Standard measures of mental health (Kessler-6 Distress Scale), productivity (Brief Instrument to Assess Workers’ Productivity During a Working Day), and physical activity (International Physical Activity Questionnaire) were used, and respondents were further surveyed on changes to their dietary, exercise, smoking, drinking, and socialization habits to produce a well-being change index. Results The results revealed associations between sedentary behavior and poorer mental health (τb=0.14) and between poorer mental health and low work productivity (τb=–0.39). However, both positive and negative lifestyle changes were reported; a self-reported increase in well-being (with respect to diet, exercise, smoking, alcohol consumption, and socialization) since the start of the pandemic was associated with both better mental health (τb=–0.14) and better work productivity (τb=0.14). Of note, among respondents without a mental health diagnosis (137/184, 74.4%), we observed rates of moderate (76/137, 55.5%) and severe (17/137, 12.4%) psychological distress, which were markedly higher than those reported in large prepandemic studies; moreover, 70.1% (129/184) of our respondents reported more sedentary behavior, 41% (69/168) increased their alcohol consumption, and 38.6% (71/184) increased their overall food intake. However, 46% (75/163), 44.8% (39/87) and 51.8% (57/110) of respondents reported spending more time walking and engaging in more moderate and vigorous exercise, respectively. Qualitative analysis revealed many positive adaptations to lockdowns (eg, decreased commuting expenses, flexibility) but also a number of structural obstacles to remote working (eg, lack of support and high expectations from employers, childcare duties). Conclusions These findings may be of practical importance for policy makers and employers in a world in which work involves long-term remote or hybrid employment arrangements; strategies to promote more sustainable remote working are discussed.

Comprehension of many types of texts involves constructing meaning from text and pictures. However, research examining how second language (L2) learners process text and pictures and the relationship with comprehension is scarce. Thus, while verbal input is often presented in written and auditory modes simultaneously (i.e., audio of text with simultaneous reading of it), we do not know how the auditory input affects L2 adult learners' processing of text and pictures and its relation to comprehension. In the current study, L2 adult learners and native (L1) adults read and read while listening to an illustrated story while their eye movements were recorded. Immediately after reading, they completed a comprehension test. Results showed that the presence of auditory input allowed learners to spend more time looking at pictures and supported a better integration of text and pictures. No differences were observed between L2 and L1 readers' allocation of attention to text and pictures. Both reading conditions led to similar levels of comprehension. Processing time on the text was positively related to comprehension for L2 readers, while it was associated to lower comprehension for L1 readers. Processing time on images was positively related to comprehension only for L1 readers.

This study examined the processing and acquisition of novel words and their collocates (i.e., words that frequently co-occur with other words) from reading and the effect of frequency of exposure on this process. First and second language speakers of English read a story with 1) eight exposures of adjective-pseudoword collocations, 2) four exposures of the same collocations, or 3) eight exposures of control collocations. Results of recall and recognition tests showed that participants acquired knowledge not only of the form and meaning of the pseudowords but also of their collocates. The analysis of eye movements showed a significant effect of exposure on the processing of novel collocations for both first and second language readers, with reading times decreasing as a function of exposure. Eight exposures to novel adjective-pseudoword collocations were enough to develop processing speed comparable to that of known collocations. However, when analyzing the processing of the individual components of the collocations, results showed that eight exposures to the pseudowords were not enough for second language readers to develop processing speed comparable to known words. The frequency manipulation in the present study (four vs. eight exposures) did not lead to differences in the learning or processing of collocations. Finally, reading times were not a significant predictor of vocabulary gains.

Over the past few decades, our understanding of the cognitive processes underpinning our navigational abilities has expanded considerably. Models have been constructed that attempt to explain various key aspects of our wayfinding abilities, from the selection of salient features in environments to the processes involved in updating our position with respect to those features during movement.However, there remain several key open questions. Much of the research in spatial cognition has investigated visuospatial performance on the basis of sensory input (predominantly vision, but also sound, hapsis, and kinaesthesia), and while language production has been the subject of extensive research in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, many aspects of language encoding remain unexplored.The research presented in this thesis aimed to explore outstanding issues in spatial language processing, tying together conceptual ends from different fields that have the potential to greatly inform each other, but focused specifically on how landmark information and spatial reference frames are encoded in mental representations characterised by different spatial reference frames. The first five experiments introduce a paradigm in which subjects encode skeletal route descriptions containing egocentric (“left/right”) or allocentric (cardinal) relational terms, while they also intentionally maintain an imagined egocentric or allocentric viewpoint. By testing participants’ spatial knowledge either in an allocentric (Experiments 1-3) or in an egocentric task (Experiments 4 and 5) this research exploits the facilitation produced by encoding-test congruence to clarify the contribution of mental imagery during spatial language processing and spatial tasks. Additionally, Experiments 1-3 adopted an eye-tracking methodology to study the allocation of attention to landmarks in descriptions and sketch maps as a function of linguistic reference frame and imagined perspective, while also recording subjective self-reports of participants’ phenomenal experiences. Key findings include evidence that egocentric and allocentric relational terms may not map directly onto egocentric and allocentric imagined perspectives, calling into question a common assumption of psycholinguistic studies of spatial language. A novel way to establish experimental control over mental representations is presented, together with evidence that specific eye gaze patterns on landmark words or landmark regions of maps can be diagnostic of different imagined spatial perspectives.Experiments 4 and 5 adopted the same key manipulations to the study of spatial updating and bearing estimation following encoding of short, aurally presented route descriptions. By employing two different response modes in this triangle completion task, Experiments 4 and 5 attempted to address key issues of experimental control that may have caused the conflicting results found in the literature on spatial updating during mental navigation and visuospatial imagery. The impact of encoding manipulations and of differences in response modality on embodiment and task performance were explored.Experiments 6-8 subsequently attempted to determine the developmental trajectory for the ability to discriminate between navigationally salient and nonsalient landmarks, and to translate spatial relations between different reference frames. In these developmental studies, children and young adolescents were presented with videos portraying journeys through virtual environments from an egocentric perspective, and tested their ability to translate the resulting representations in order to perform allocentric spatial tasks. No clear facilitation effect of decision-point landmarks was observed or any strong indication that salient navigational features are more strongly represented in memory within the age range we tested (four to 11 years of age). Possible reasons for this are discussed in light of the relevant literature and methodological differences.Globally, the results presented indicate a functional role of imagery during language processing, pointing to the importance of introspection and accurate task analyses when interpreting behavioural results. Additionally, the study of implicit measures of attention such as eye tracking measures has the potential to improve our understanding mental representations, and of how they mediate between perception, action, and language. Lastly, these results also suggest that synergy between seemingly distinct research areas may be key in better characterising the nature of mental imagery in its different forms, and that the phenomenology of imagery content will be an essential part of this and future research.

We use eye tracking to investigate the attention readers pay to different textual features to determine their significance in the appreciation of prose fiction. Previous research examined attention allocation to lexical and punctuation variants, and the impact on reading dynamics for the remainder of the text, demonstrating that readers notice both kinds of variants but assign less value to the latter (Carrol, Conklin, Guy, & Scott, 2016). Here, in two experiments, we examine two conditions that may affect attention allocation: We investigate the influence of reader expertise (Experiment 1) and whether performance is influenced by a task-specific “spot-the-difference” effect (Experiment 2). We found that expertise plays little role in readers’ greater sensitivity to lexical rather than punctuation changes, and that the advantage for lexical changes persisted when the time interval between exposures is increased. These results confirm earlier findings: that small-scale features may not possess the creative significance predicated of them by critics and text-editors.