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396
Grounding language in action
- Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
, 2002
"... We report a new phenomenon associated with language comprehension: the action–sentence compatibility effect (ACE). Participants judged whether sentences were sensible by making a response that required moving toward or away from their bodies. When a sentence implied action in one direction (e.g., “C ..."
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Cited by 353 (16 self)
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We report a new phenomenon associated with language comprehension: the action–sentence compatibility effect (ACE). Participants judged whether sentences were sensible by making a response that required moving toward or away from their bodies. When a sentence implied action in one direction (e.g., “Close the drawer ” implies action away from the body), the participants had difficulty making a sensibility judgment requiring a response in the opposite direction. The ACE was demonstrated for three sentences types: imperative sentences, sentences describing the transfer of concrete objects, and sentences describing the transfer of abstract entities, such as “Liz told you the story. ” These data are inconsistent with theories of language comprehension in which meaning is represented as a set of relations among nodes. Instead, the data support an embodied theory of meaning that relates the meaning of sentences to human action. How language conveys meaning remains an open question. The dominant approach is to treat language as a symbol manipulation system: Language conveys meaning by using abstract, amodal, and arbitrary symbols (i.e., words) combined by syntactic rules (e.g., Burgess & Lund, 1997; Chomsky, 1980; Fodor, 2000; Kintsch, 1988; Pinker, 1994). Words are abstract in that the same word, such as “chair, ” is used for big chairs and little chairs, words are amodal in that the same word is used when chairs are spoken about or written about, and words are arbitrarily related to their referents in that the phonemic and orthographic characteristics of a word bear no relationship to the physical or functional characteristics of the word’s referent. An alternative view is that linguistic meaning is
Six views of embodied cognition
- PSYCHONOMIC BULLETIN AND REVIEW
, 2002
"... The emerging viewpoint of embodied cognition holds that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body’s interactions with the world. This position actually houses a number of distinct claims, some of which are more controversial than others. This paper distinguishes and evaluates the following s ..."
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Cited by 339 (1 self)
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The emerging viewpoint of embodied cognition holds that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body’s interactions with the world. This position actually houses a number of distinct claims, some of which are more controversial than others. This paper distinguishes and evaluates the following six claims: 1) cognition is situated; 2) cognition is time-pressured; 3) we off-load cognitive work onto the environment; 4) the environment is part of the cognitive system; 5) cognition is for action; 6) off-line cognition is body-based. Of these, the first three and the fifth appear to be at least partially true, and their usefulness is best evaluated in terms of the range of their applicability. The fourth claim, I argue, is deeply problematic. The sixth claim has received the least attention in the literature on embodied cognition, but it may in fact be the best documented and most powerful of the six claims.
Emobdiment in attitudes, social perception, and emotion
- Personality and Social Psychology Review
, 2005
"... Findings in the social psychology literatures on attitudes, social perception, and emo-tion demonstrate that social information processing involves embodiment, where em-bodiment refers both to actual bodily states and to simulations of experience in the brain's modality-specific systems for per ..."
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Cited by 185 (28 self)
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Findings in the social psychology literatures on attitudes, social perception, and emo-tion demonstrate that social information processing involves embodiment, where em-bodiment refers both to actual bodily states and to simulations of experience in the brain's modality-specific systems for perception, action, and introspection. We show that embodiment underlies social information processing when the perceiver inter-acts with actual social objects (online cognition) and when the perceiver represents social objects in their absence (offline cognition). Although many empirical demon-strations ofsocial embodiment exist, no particularly compelling account ofthem has been offered. We propose that theories ofembodied cognition, such as the Perceptual Symbol Systems (PSS) account (Barsalou, 1999), explain and integrate these find-ings, and that they also suggest exciting new directionsfor research. We compare the PSS account to a variety of related proposals and show how it addresses criticisms that have previously posed problems for the general embodiment approach. Consider the following findings. Wells and Petty (1980) reported that nodding the head (as in agree-ment) while listening to persuasive messages led to more positive attitudes toward the message content than shaking the head (as in disagreement). Caciop-po, Priester, and Berntson (1993) observed that novel Chinese ideographs presented during arm flexion (an action associated with approach) were subsequently evaluated more favorably than ideographs presented during arm extension (an action associated with avoid-ance). Duclos et al. (1989) led participants to adopt The authors thank Vic Ferreira, Art Glenberg, Danny McIntosh, Randy O'Reilly, and Cathy Reed for their helpful comments on vari-
Symbol grounding and meaning: A comparison of high-dimensional and embodied theories of meaning
- Journal of Memory and Language
, 2000
"... model meaning as the relations among abstract symbols that are arbitrarily related to what they signify. These symbols are ungrounded in that they are not tied to perceptual experience or action. Because the symbols are ungrounded, they cannot, in principle, capture the meaning of novel situations. ..."
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Cited by 178 (9 self)
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model meaning as the relations among abstract symbols that are arbitrarily related to what they signify. These symbols are ungrounded in that they are not tied to perceptual experience or action. Because the symbols are ungrounded, they cannot, in principle, capture the meaning of novel situations. In contrast, participants in three experiments found it trivially easy to discriminate between descriptions of sensible novel situations (e.g., using a newspaper to protect one’s face from the wind) and nonsense novel situations (e.g., using a matchbook to protect one’s face from the wind). These results support the Indexical Hypothesis that the meaning of a sentence is constructed by (a) indexing words and phrases to real objects or perceptual, analog symbols; (b) deriving affordances from the objects and symbols; and (c) meshing the affordances under the guidance of syntax. © 2000 Academic Press Key Words: meaning; language; embodiment; computational models; Latent Semantic Analysis; Hyperspace Analogue to Language. Meaning is the most important problem in cognitive psychology. Meaning controls memory and perception. Meaning is the goal of communication. Meaning underlies social activities and culture: To a great degree, what distinguishes human cultures are the meanings they give to natural phenomena, artifacts, and human relations. Yet, rather than being a hotbed of theoretical and empirical investigation, meaning in cognitive psychology has been coopted by a particular approach: Meaning arises
The dynamics of active categorical perception in an evolved model agent
- ADAPTIVE BEHAVIOR
, 2003
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Cortical mechanisms of action selection: the affordance competition hypothesis.
- Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
, 2007
"... At every moment, the natural world presents animals with two fundamental pragmatic problems: selection between actions that are currently possible and specification of the parameters or metrics of those actions. It is commonly suggested that the brain addresses these by first constructing represent ..."
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Cited by 96 (3 self)
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At every moment, the natural world presents animals with two fundamental pragmatic problems: selection between actions that are currently possible and specification of the parameters or metrics of those actions. It is commonly suggested that the brain addresses these by first constructing representations of the world on which to build knowledge and make a decision, and then by computing and executing an action plan. However, neurophysiological data argue against this serial viewpoint. In contrast, it is proposed here that the brain processes sensory information to specify, in parallel, several potential actions that are currently available. These potential actions compete against each other for further processing, while information is collected to bias this competition until a single response is selected. The hypothesis suggests that the dorsal visual system specifies actions which compete against each other within the fronto-parietal cortex, while a variety of biasing influences are provided by prefrontal regions and the basal ganglia. A computational model is described, which illustrates how this competition may take place in the cerebral cortex. Simulations of the model capture qualitative features of neurophysiological data and reproduce various behavioural phenomena.
Self-organization of cognitive performance
- Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
, 2003
"... Background noise is the irregular variation across repeated measurements of human performance. Background noise remains after task and treatment effects are minimized. Background noise refers to intrinsic sources of variability, the intrinsic dynamics of mind and body, and the internal workings of a ..."
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Cited by 86 (14 self)
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Background noise is the irregular variation across repeated measurements of human performance. Background noise remains after task and treatment effects are minimized. Background noise refers to intrinsic sources of variability, the intrinsic dynamics of mind and body, and the internal workings of a living being. Two experiments demonstrate 1/f scaling (pink noise) in simple reaction times and speeded word naming times, which round out a catalog of laboratory task demonstrations that background noise is pink noise. Ubiquitous pink noise suggests processes of mind and body that change each other’s dynamics. Such interaction-dominant dynamics are found in systems that self-organize their behavior. Self-organization provides an unconventional perspective on cognition, but this perspective closely parallels a contemporary interdisciplinary view of living systems. Psychological science usually ignores the background noise in behavioral data. Background noise is what is left over when task demands, experimental manipulations, and other external sources of variability have been eliminated or minimized. What we call background noise is treated as random variability in most research, the nuisance factor in factorial experiments. We argue, to the
The similarity-in-topography principle: reconciling theories of conceptual deficits
- Cognitive Neuropsychology
, 2003
"... Three theories currently compete to explain the conceptual deficits that result from brain damage: sensory-functional theory, domain-specific theory, and conceptual structure theory. We argue that all three theories capture important aspects of conceptual deficits, and offer different insights into ..."
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Cited by 80 (15 self)
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Three theories currently compete to explain the conceptual deficits that result from brain damage: sensory-functional theory, domain-specific theory, and conceptual structure theory. We argue that all three theories capture important aspects of conceptual deficits, and offer different insights into their origins. Conceptual topography theory (CTT) integrates these insights, beginning with A. R. Damasio’s (1989) convergence zone theory and elaborating it with the similarity-in-topography (SIT) principle. According to CTT, feature maps in sensory-motor systems represent the features of a category’s exemplars. A hierarchical system of convergence zones then conjoins these features to form both property and category representations. According to the SIT principle, the proximity of two conjunctive neurons in a convergence zone increases with the similarity of the features they conjoin. As a result, conjunctive neurons become topographically organised into local regions that represent properties and categories. Depending on the level and location of a lesion in this system, a wide variety of deficits is possible. Consistent with the literature, these deficits range from the loss of a single category to the loss of multiple categories that share sensory-motor properties.
