a group of high school students attended 7 educational sessions for a preventive drug abuse program. the students were exposed to drug abusers and their families. drug abusers and their families informed the subjects about the consequences of addiction in their life: how they became addicted and how the addiction worsened their psychosocial life. moreover their families explained to students th...

We investigated how processing fluency and defamiliarization (the art of rendering familiar notions unfamiliar) contribute to the affective and esthetic processing of reading in an event-related functional magnetic-resonance-imaging experiment. We compared the neural correlates of processing (a) familiar German proverbs, (b) unfamiliar proverbs, (c) defamiliarized variations with altered conten...

We attacked the problem of solving crossword puzzles by computer: given a set of clues and a crossword grid, try to maximize the number of words correctly lled in. After an analysis of a large collection of puzzles, we decided to use an open architecture in which independent programs specialize in solving speciic types of clues, drawing on ideas from information retrieval, database search, and ...

A hallmark of schizophrenia is impaired proverb interpretation, which could be due to: (1) aberrant activation of disorganized semantic associations, or (2) working memory (WM) deficits. We assessed 18 schizophrenia patients and 18 normal control participants on proverb interpretation, and evaluated these two hypotheses by examining within patients the correlations of proverb interpretation wit...

BACKGROUND For decades, impaired proverb comprehension has been regarded as typical of schizophrenic thought disorder. Testing patients' proverb understanding has widely been abandoned, however, due to poor reliability and validity of the assessment procedures. Since the underlying cognitive deficit of impaired proverb interpretation remained obscure, this study sought to determine the relation...

We attacked the problem of solving crossword puzzles by computer: given a set of clues and a crossword grid, try to maximize the number of words correctly lled in. In our system, \expert modules" specialize in solving speci c types of clues, drawing on ideas from information retrieval, database search, and machine learning. Each expert module generates a (possibly empty) candidate list for each...

In the Proverbs Test (10), the subject is asked to tell the meaning of a proverb. For normal subjects, even as young as fifth graders, this request readily stimulates what Goldstein refers to as the "abstract attitude." Indeed, the process of translating the concrete symbols of a proverb into generalized concepts is almost explicitly described in one of Goldstein's characterizations of abstract...

This paper presents a research on the use of proverbs in written advertising texts from Portuguese press. The analysis focus on the presence of the proverb in the text both changed and unaltered. The different strategies of transformation are presented. Introduction Proverbs are wise sayings, short definitions of wisdom (Mieder, 1999). When we hear or read the sentence “All roads lead to Rome” ...

We attacked the problem of solving crossword puzzles by computer: Given a set of clues and a crossword grid, try to maximize the number of words correctly filled in. PaOVEaB, the probabilistic cruciverbalist, separates the problem into two, more familiar subproblems: candidate generation and grid filling. In candidate generation, each clue is treated as a type of query to an information retriev...