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104
Psychological universals: What are they and how can we know
- Psychological Bulletin
, 2005
"... Psychological universals, or core mental attributes shared by humans everywhere, are a foundational postulate of psychology, yet explicit analysis of how to identify such universals is lacking. This article offers a conceptual and methodological framework to guide the investigation of genuine univer ..."
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Psychological universals, or core mental attributes shared by humans everywhere, are a foundational postulate of psychology, yet explicit analysis of how to identify such universals is lacking. This article offers a conceptual and methodological framework to guide the investigation of genuine universals through empirical analysis of psychological patterns across cultures. Issues of cross-cultural generalizability of psychological processes and 3 cross-cultural research strategies to probe universals are considered. Four distinct levels of hierarchically organized universals are possible: From strongest to weakest claims for universality, they are accessibility universals, functional universals, existential universals, and nonuniversals. Finally, universals are examined in relation to the questions of levels of analysis, evolutionary explanations of psychological processes, and management of cross-cultural relations.
The Weirdest People in the World?
"... To be published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (in press) ..."
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Cited by 61 (1 self)
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To be published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (in press)
Shake, Rattle, `n' Roll: The Representation of Motion in Language and Cognition
- COGNITION
, 2002
"... Languages vary strikingly in how they encode motion events. In some languages (e.g. English), manner of motion is typically encoded within the verb, while direction of motion information appears in modifiers. In other languages (e.g. Greek), the verb usually encodes the direction of motion, while th ..."
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Cited by 53 (13 self)
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Languages vary strikingly in how they encode motion events. In some languages (e.g. English), manner of motion is typically encoded within the verb, while direction of motion information appears in modifiers. In other languages (e.g. Greek), the verb usually encodes the direction of motion, while the manner information is often omitted, or encoded in modifiers. We designed two studies to investigate whether these language-specific patterns affect speakers' reasoning about motion. We compared the performance of English and Greek children and adults (a) in nonlinguistic (memory and categorization) tasks involving motion events, and (b) in their linguistic descriptions of these same motion events. Even though the two linguistic groups differed significantly in terms of their linguistic preferences, their performance in the nonlinguistic tasks was identical. More surprisingly, the linguistic descriptions given by subjects within language also failed to correlate consistently with their memory and categorization performance in the relevant regards. For the domain studied, these results are consistent with the view that conceptual development and organization are largely independent of language-specific labeling practices. The discussion emphasizes that the necessarily sketchy nature of language use assures that it will be at best a crude index of thought.
From chair to ‘‘chair:’’ A representational shift account of object labeling effects on memory
- Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
, 2008
"... What are the consequences of calling things by their names? Six experiments investigated how classifying familiar objects with basic-level names (chairs, tables, and lamps) affected recognition memory. Memory was found to be worse for items that were overtly classified with the category name—as refl ..."
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Cited by 25 (7 self)
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What are the consequences of calling things by their names? Six experiments investigated how classifying familiar objects with basic-level names (chairs, tables, and lamps) affected recognition memory. Memory was found to be worse for items that were overtly classified with the category name—as reflected by lower hit rates—compared with items that were not overtly classified. This effect of labeling on subsequent recall is explained in terms of a representational shift account, with labeling causing a distortion in dimensions most reliably associated with the category label. Consistent with this account, effects of labeling were strongly mediated by typicality and ambiguity of the labeled items, with typical and unambiguous items most affected by labeling. Follow-up experiments showed that this effect cannot be explained solely by differences in initial encoding, further suggesting that labeling a familiar image distorts its encoded representation. This account suggests a possible mechanism for the verbal
Language Is Not Just for Talking -- Redundant Labels Facilitate Learning of Novel Categories
, 2007
"... In addition to having communicative functions, verbal labels may play a role in shaping concepts. Two experiments assessed whether the presence of labels affected category formation. Subjects learned to categorize ‘‘aliens’’ as those to be approached or those to be avoided. After accuracy feedback ..."
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Cited by 24 (1 self)
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In addition to having communicative functions, verbal labels may play a role in shaping concepts. Two experiments assessed whether the presence of labels affected category formation. Subjects learned to categorize ‘‘aliens’’ as those to be approached or those to be avoided. After accuracy feedback on each response was provided, a nonsense label was either presented or not. Providing
Orientation tasks with multiple views of space: strategies and performance
- Spatial Cognition and Computation
, 2004
"... Two experiments examine how participants vary in their approach to solving an orientation task. Verbal reports from untrained participants in a pilot study revealed that some participants used a strategy based on mental imagery, while others used verbal descriptions to do the task. The two experimen ..."
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Cited by 15 (4 self)
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Two experiments examine how participants vary in their approach to solving an orientation task. Verbal reports from untrained participants in a pilot study revealed that some participants used a strategy based on mental imagery, while others used verbal descriptions to do the task. The two experiments presented here involved training participants to perform the orientation task using one of these strategies. Participants ’ performance, measured by response time and eye movements, differed as a function of strategy. An ACT-R model of the task that uses the strategies provides a validation of the proposed mechanisms, producing a close fit to both the response time and eye movement data. The model's success is achieved, in part, by performing all aspects of the task, from processing the information on the screen to making responses. Overall, the results indicate that strategic variability is an important feature of human performance on such tasks.
Psycholinguistics, formal grammars, and cognitive science
- The Linguistic Review
, 2005
"... Abstract In the 1980s, Charles Clifton referred to a "psycholinguistic renaissance" in cognitive science. During ..."
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Abstract In the 1980s, Charles Clifton referred to a "psycholinguistic renaissance" in cognitive science. During
Trading spaces: Carving up events for learning language
- Perspectives on Psychological Science
, 2010
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Grammatical gender effects on cognition: Implications for language learning and language use
- Journal of Experimental Psychology
, 2005
"... In 4 experiments, the authors addressed the mechanisms by which grammatical gender (in Italian and German) may come to affect meaning. In Experiments 1 (similarity judgments) and 2 (semantic substitution errors), the authors found Italian gender effects for animals but not for artifacts; Experiment ..."
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Cited by 11 (2 self)
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In 4 experiments, the authors addressed the mechanisms by which grammatical gender (in Italian and German) may come to affect meaning. In Experiments 1 (similarity judgments) and 2 (semantic substitution errors), the authors found Italian gender effects for animals but not for artifacts; Experiment 3 revealed no comparable effects in German. These results suggest that gender effects arise as a generalization from an established association between gender of nouns and sex of human referents, extending to nouns referring to sexuated entities. Across languages, such effects are found when the language allows for easy mapping between gender of nouns and sex of human referents (Italian) but not when the mapping is less transparent (German). A final experiment provided further constraints: These effects during processing arise at a lexical–semantic level rather than at a conceptual level.
Language and spatial frames of reference in mind and brain
- Trends in Cognitive Science
, 2002
"... Introspectively, language seems so closely connected to the process of thinking as to be indistinguishable from it. Our thoughts seem to spring into existence as the words that express them are formed. This accounts perhaps for the enduring appeal of the thesis that our language determines significa ..."
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Cited by 10 (0 self)
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Introspectively, language seems so closely connected to the process of thinking as to be indistinguishable from it. Our thoughts seem to spring into existence as the words that express them are formed. This accounts perhaps for the enduring appeal of the thesis that our language determines significant aspects of our thought. In its strongest form, this is the thesis that the concepts that we manipulate in thinking are the concepts provided by our language (Whorf, see Carroll, 1956; for more recent elaborations of views along these lines, see Gumperz & Levinson, 1996). The intimate association between our language and our introspective experience of thought may also explain the continuing appeal among philosophers of Descartes ' argument that animals do not have thoughts (Davidson, 2001; Sellars, 1956/1963). If (human) languages are the media of human thoughts (cf. Quine, 1960), then non-human animals do not have anything like human thoughts. The alternative view is that language is merely the vehicle by which humans communicate concepts that exist prior to and independently of their linguistic encoding. In the latter case, humans speaking radically different languages and animals with no language at all may all entertain the same concepts--and we may hope to have a
