Accounting for how the human mind represents the internal and external world is a crucial feature of many theories of human cognition. Central to this question is the distinction between modal as opposed to amodal representational formats. It has often been assumed that one but not both of these two types of representations underlie processing in specific domains of cognition (e.g., perception, mental imagery, and language). However, in this paper, we suggest that both formats play a major role in most cognitive domains. We believe that a comprehensive theory of cognition requires a solid understanding of these representational formats and their functional roles within and across different domains of cognition, the developmental trajectory of these representational formats, and their role in dysfunctional behavior. Here we sketch such an overarching perspective that brings together research from diverse subdisciplines of psychology on modal and amodal representational formats so as to unravel their functional principles and their interactions.

The embodied account of language comprehension has been one of the most influential theoretical developments in the recent decades addressing the question how humans comprehend and represent language. To examine its assumptions, many studies have made use of behavioral paradigms involving basic compatibility effects. The action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE) is one of the most influential of these compatibility effects and is the most widely cited evidence for the embodied account of language comprehension. However, recently there have been difficulties in extending or even in reliably replicating the ACE. The conflicting findings concerning the ACE and its extensions lead to the discussion of whether the ACE is indeed a reliable effect. In a first step we conducted a meta-analysis using a random-effects model. This analysis revealed a small but significant effect size of the ACE. Furthermore, the task-parameter Delay occurred as a factor of interest in whether the ACE appears with positive or negative effect direction. A second meta-analytic approach (Fisher's method) supports these findings. Additionally, an analysis of publication bias suggests that there is bias in the ACE literature. In post-hoc analyses of the recent multi-lab investigation of the ACE (Morey et al., 2021), evidence for individual differences in the ACE was found. However, further analyses indicate that these differences are likely due to item-specific variability and the specific way in which items were assigned to conditions in the counterbalancing lists.

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and negation-related phenomena in psycholinguistics. In generative theoretical linguistics, negation and polarity sensitivity have been extensively studied, as the related phenomena are situated at the interfaces of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and are thus extremely revealing about the architecture of grammar. With the now long tradition of research on negation and polarity in psychology and psycholinguistics, and the emerging field of experimental semantics and pragmatics, a multitude of interests and experimental paradigms have emerged which call for re-evaluations and further development and integration. This special issue contains a collection of 16 research articles on the processing of negation and negation-related phenomena including polarity items, questions, conditionals, and irony, using a combination of behavioral (e.g., rating, reading, eye-tracking and sentence completion) and neuroimaging techniques (e.g., EEG). They showcase the processing of negation and polarity with or without context, in various languages and across different populations (adults, typically developing and ADHD children). The integration of multiple theoretical and empirical perspectives in this collection provides new insights, methodological advances and directions for future research.