Children apply various strategies to mentally solve multi-digit subtraction problems and the efficient use of some of them may depend more or less on numerical magnitude processing. For example, the indirect addition strategy (solving 72-67 as "how much do I have to add up to 67 to get 72?"), which is particularly efficient when the two given numbers are close to each other, requires to determine the proximity of these two numbers, a process that may depend on numerical magnitude processing. In the present study, children completed a numerical magnitude comparison task and a number line estimation task, both in a symbolic and nonsymbolic format, to measure their numerical magnitude processing. We administered a multi-digit subtraction task, in which half of the items were specifically designed to elicit indirect addition. Partial correlational analyses, controlling for intellectual ability and motor speed, revealed significant associations between numerical magnitude processing and mental multi-digit subtraction. Additional analyses indicated that numerical magnitude processing was particularly important for those items for which the use of indirect addition is expected to be most efficient. Although this association was observed for both symbolic and nonsymbolic tasks, the strongest associations were found for the symbolic format, and they seemed to be more prominent on numerical magnitude comparison than on number line estimation.

Konkle and Oliva (in press, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance) found that the preferred ('canonical') visual size of a picture of an object within a frame is proportional to the logarithm of its known physical size. They used within-participants designs on several tasks, including having participants adjust the object's size to 'look best'. We examined visual size preference in 2AFC tasks with explicit aesthetic instructions to choose: "which of each pair you like best". We also used both within- and between-participants conditions to investigate the possible role of demand characteristics. In experiments 1 and 2, participants saw all possible image pairs depicting the same object at six different sizes for twelve real-world objects that varied in physical size. Significant effects of known physical size were present, regardless of whether participants made judgments about a single object (the between-participants design) or about all objects intermixed (the within-participants design). Experiment 3 showed a reduced effect when the amount of image detail present at different visual sizes was kept constant by posterizing the images. The results are discussed in terms of ecological biases on aesthetic preferences.

Five experiments examined preferences for horizontal positions in multiobject pictures. In Experiment 1, each picture contained a fixed object and an object whose position could be adjusted to create the most (or least) aesthetically pleasing image. Observers placed the movable object closer to the fixed object when the objects were related than when they were unrelated (a relatedness bias) but almost never overlapped them (a separation bias). Experiment 2 showed that these results were not due to demand characteristics by replicating them almost exactly in a between-participants design. In Experiment 3, preference rankings revealed a strong relatedness bias together with an inward bias toward the spatial envelope of objects to point into the frame. A weak balance effect was evident in a multiple regression analysis. Experiment 4 replicated the inward bias for the spatial envelope using multiobject groups. Experiment 5 generalized the above findings for different objects when observers had to choose between image pairs that differed only in interobject distance or degree of balance. Strong relatedness effects were again present, but there was no evidence of any preference for balance.

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The research of the word is still very much the research of the noun. Adjectives have been largely overlooked, despite being the second-largest word class in many languages and serving an important communicative function, because of the rich, nuanced qualifications they afford. Adjectives are also ideally suited to study the interface between cognition and emotion, as they naturally cover the entire range of lexicosemantic variables such as imageability (infinite-green), and affective variables such as valence (sad-happy). We illustrate this by showing how the centrality of words in the mental lexicon varies as a function of the words' affective dimensions, using newly collected norms for 1,000 Dutch adjectives. The norms include the lexicosemantic variables age of acquisition, familiarity, concreteness, and imageability; the affective variables valence, arousal, and dominance; and a variety of distributional variables, including network statistics resulting from a large-scale word association study. The norms are freely available from https://osf.io/nyg8v/, for researchers studying adjectives specifically or for whom adjectives constitute convenient stimuli to study other topics, such as vagueness, inference, spatial cognition, or affective word processing.