According to the stress gradient hypothesis (SGH), ecological interactions between organisms shift positively as environmental stress increases. In the case of associational resistance, habitat is modified to ameliorate stress, benefitting other organisms. The SGH is contentious due to conflicting evidence and theoretical perspectives, so we adopted a meta-analytic approach to determine if it is widely supported across a variety of contexts, including different kingdoms, ecosystems, habitats, interactions, stressors, and life history stages. We developed an extensive list of Boolean search criteria to search the published ecological literature and successfully detect studies that both directly tested the hypothesis, and those that were relevant but never mentioned it. We found that the SGH is well supported by studies that feature bacteria, plants, terrestrial ecosystems, interspecific negative interactions, adults, survival instead of growth or reproduction, and drought, fire, and nutrient stress. We conclude that the SGH is indeed a broadly relevant ecological hypothesis that is currently held back by cross-disciplinary communication barriers. More SGH research is needed beyond the scope of interspecific plant competition, and more SGH research should feature multifactor stress. There remains a need to account for positive interactions in scientific pursuits, such as associational resistance in tests of the SGH.

In the context of the embodied cognition debate, an effect of motion verb associated speed information has previously been detected using eye-tracking, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and reaction times (RT). The latter, for instance, was implemented by Wender and Weber (1982), who observed that participants were faster in detecting motion in sentences associated with fast motion compared to sentences associated with slow motion after having formed mental images of the sentences\' content. It remains open whether the reported effects of speed are associated with automatic lexical-semantic retrieval processes or whether they reflect higher top-down cognitive processes. To answer this question, the paradigm by Wender and Weber (1982) was adopted and further elaborated in the present study. In Experiment 1 visualization instructions were eliminated. Additionally, the stimulus material was manipulated in regards to the agent of the described movement (human vs. object motion) in order to determine the representation\'s modality (visual vs. motoric). In Experiment 2, the task to detect motion was replaced by the task to judge sensicality. The results suggest that the prompt to perform mental imagery is not a precondition for the engagement of modal representations in this speed of motion paradigm and that the involved representations\' modality is visual rather than motoric. However, the modal representations\' involvement is dependent on the task. They thus do not seem to be part of the invariant semantic representation of manner of motion verbs.

Some studies in experimental pragmatics have concluded that scalar inferences (e.g., \'some X are Y\' implicates \'not all X are Y\') are context-dependent pragmatic computations delayed relative to semantic computations. However, it remains unclear whether strong contextual support is necessary to trigger such inferences. Here we tested if the scalar inference \'not all\' triggered by some can be evoked in a maximally neutral context. We investigated event-related potential (ERP) amplitude modulations elicited by Stroop-like conflicts in participants instructed to indicate whether strings of letters were printed with all their letters in upper case or otherwise. In a randomized stream of non-words and distractor words, the words all, some and case were either presented in capitals or they featured at least one lower case letter. As expected, we found a significant conflict-related N450 modulation when comparing e.g., \'aLl\' with \'ALL\'. Surprisingly, despite the fact that most responses from the same participants in a sentence-picture verification task were literal, we also found a similar modulation when comparing \'SOME\' with e.g., \'SoMe\', even though SOME could only elicit such a Stroop conflict when construed pragmatically. No such modulation was found for e.g., \'CasE\' vs. \'CASE\' (neutral contrast). These results suggest that some can appear incongruent with the concept of \'all\' even when contextual support is minimal. Furthermore, there was no significant correlation between N450 effect magnitude (\'SOME\' minus e.g., \'sOMe\') and pragmatic response rate recorded in the sentence-picture verification task. Overall, this study shows for the first time that the pragmatic meaning of some can be accessed in a maximally neutral context, and thus, that the scalar inference \'not all\' triggered by some should be construed as context-sensitive rather than context-dependent, that is, more or less salient and relevant depending on the context rather than entirely contingent upon it.