汉语情感效价空间隐喻的手势表达

本文从伴语手势视角系统探讨汉语母语者情感效价的空间化隐喻模式。结果发现:1)上下、前后、左右以及大小四个空间维度均可形成相应的情感手势隐喻,体现了空间经验在人类概念系统中的核心地位;2)身体结构的共同性,以及身体与客观世界的相互作用是形成情感效价空间隐喻的重要动因;3)文化图式影响心智与身体的联结,强化或改变了情感隐喻的具身效应,体现了人类认知的情境性。整个研究表明,情感隐喻可以通过伴语手势得到表达,证明了概念隐喻的心理现实性。国家973计划课题“语言认知的神经机制”(2014CB340502);;江苏高校“中国语言文学”优势学科建设工程资助项目(PAPD);;国家社科基金项目“非言语情绪交互与外语课堂教学有效性研究”(15BYY082

Contrasting vertical and horizontal representations of affect in emotional visual search

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/ 10.3758/s13423-015-0884-6Independent lines of evidence suggest that the representation of emotional evaluation recruits both vertical and horizontal spatial mappings. These two spatial mappings differ in their experiential origins and their productivity, and available data suggest that they differ in their saliency. Yet, no study has so far compared their relative strength in an attentional orienting reaction time task that affords the simultaneous manifestation of both of them. Here we investigated this question using a visual search task with emotional faces. We presented angry and happy face targets and neutral distracter faces in top, bottom, left, and right locations on the computer screen. Conceptual congruency effects were observed along the vertical dimension supporting the ‘up=good’ metaphor, but not along the horizontal dimension. This asymmetrical processing pattern was observed when faces were presented in a cropped (Experiment 1) and whole (Experiment 2) format. These findings suggest that the ‘up=good’ metaphor is more salient and readily activated than the ‘right=good’ metaphor, and that the former outcompetes the latter when the task context affords the simultaneous activation of both mappings

Carving the body at its joints: Does the way we speak about the body shape the way we think about it?

Looking at the way different linguistic communities speak about a universally shared domain of experience raises questions that are central to the language sciences. How can we compare meaning across languages? What is the interaction between language, thought, and perception? Does linguistic diversity entail linguistic relativism? The literature on the naming systems of the body across languages have addressed these questions with little consensus. In the present study, we contribute to this debate with a comparison of body part terms in French, Indonesian, and Japanese. Using an updated version of the body coloring task, we observed both diversity and cross-linguistically shared patterns. Importantly, we also observed that speakers of languages which violate the wrist/ankle joint boundary rule do not collapse the distinction in thought. This key finding goes against the conflation of language and thought and leads us to conclude that linguistic diversity does not entail linguistic relativism. Methodologically, we advocate for the use of a culturally neutral etic space as a necessary tool in semantic typology. Theoretically, we propose that language is a multilevel phenomenon, which results from the interaction of non-linguistic and cross-culturally shared embodied motivations, context-specific situated language use, and culturally-specific sedimented linguistic conventions

Walking to a number: is there affective involvement in generating the SNARC effect in numerical cognition?

The effect known as the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) documents fast reaction to small numbers with a response at the left and to large numbers with a response at the right. The common explanation appeals to a hypothetical mental number line of a left-to-right orientation with the numerical magnitudes on the line activated in an automatic fashion. To explore the possibility of emotional involvement in processing, we employed prototypical affective behaviors for responses in lieu of the usual spatial-numerical ones (i.e., of pressing lateralized keys). In the present series of experiments, the participants walked toward a number or walked away from a number (in a physical approach-avoidance setup) or said “good” or “bad” in response to a number. We recorded strong SNARC effects with affective responding. For example, it took participants longer to say “good” than “bad” to small numbers, but it took them longer to say “bad” than “good” to larger numbers. Although each particular outcome can still be accounted for by a spatial interpretation, the cumulative results are suggestive of the possibly of affective involvement in generating the effect

Cultural differences in attention: Eye movement evidence from a comparative visual search task.

Individual differences in visual attention have been linked to thinking style: analytic thinking (common in individualistic cultures) is thought to promote attention to detail and focus on the most important part of a scene, whereas holistic thinking (common in collectivist cultures) promotes attention to the global structure of a scene and the relationship between its parts. However, this theory is primarily based on relatively simple judgement tasks. We compared groups from Great Britain (an individualist culture) and Saudi Arabia (a collectivist culture) on a more complex comparative visual search task, using simple natural scenes. A higher overall number of fixations for Saudi participants, along with longer search times, indicated less efficient search behaviour than British participants. Furthermore, intra-group comparisons of scan-path for Saudi participants revealed less similarity than within the British group. Together, these findings suggest that there is a positive relationship between an analytic cognitive style and controlled attention

Human handedness : a meta-analysis

Silvia Paracchini is a Royal Society University Research Fellow. Judith Schmitz is a DFG fellow and received funding from the School of Medicine, University of St Andrews for this specific work.Across time and place, right hand preference has been the norm, but what is the precise prevalence of left- and right-handedness? Frequency of left-handedness has shaped and underpinned different fields of research, from cognitive neuroscience to human evolution, but reliable distributional estimates are still lacking. While hundreds of empirical studies have assessed handedness, a large-scale, comprehensive review of the prevalence of handedness and the factors that moderate it, is currently missing. Here, we report 5 meta-analyses on hand preference for different manual tasks and show that left-handedness prevalence lies between 9.3% (using the most stringent criterion of left-handedness) to 18.1% (using the most lenient criterion of nonright-handedness), with the best overall estimate being 10.6% (10.4% when excluding studies assessing elite athletes’ handedness). Handedness variability depends on (a) study characteristics, namely year of publication and ways to measure and classify handedness, and (b) participant characteristics, namely sex and ancestry. Our analysis identifies the role of moderators that require taking into account in future studies on handedness and hemispheric asymmetries. We argue that the same evolutionary mechanisms should apply across geographical regions to maintain the roughly 1:10 ratio, while cultural factors, such as pressure against left-hand use, moderate the magnitude of the prevalence of left-handedness. Although handedness appears as a straightforward trait, there is no universal agreement on how to assess it. Therefore, we urge researchers to fully report study and participant characteristics as well as the detailed procedure by which handedness was assessed and make raw data publicly available.PostprintPeer reviewe

Degrees of metaphoricity: a quantitative gesture analysis

When a speaker uses a linguistic metaphor, how do we know that they are thinking metaphorically? One answer is by looking at their gestures (e.g., Müller, 2008). In this thesis, I propose three criteria for identifying whether a speaker is thinking metaphorically: gesture cooccurrence, gestural fit and gestural effort (see Hostetter & Alibali, 2008). I also appeal to Müller’s (2008) conception of metaphoricity as a gradable phenomenon. Using these three criteria, I conduct a large-scale, quantitative analysis of gestures in the TV News Archive, focusing on linguistic metaphors of emotional valence (‘low standards, ‘high standards’, ‘lower the standards’, ‘raise the standards’). I also look at factors that may affect the metaphoric activation of these linguistic metaphors, and whether speakers gesture in line with other conceptual metaphors of emotional valence (e.g., Casasanto, 2009). Finally, I look at whether articulatory plurality, a widely-reported feature of sign languages (e.g., Börstell et al., 2016c), can be found in co-speech gestures. Amongst other results, I find high levels of gesture co-occurrence (85.3%), gestural fit (61.5%) and gestural effort (70.8%) for all four linguistic metaphors. I also find that metaphorical verbs (‘lower’, ‘raise’) are more likely to be understood metaphorically than metaphorical adjectives (‘low’, ‘high’)

In the Beginning was the Deed: From Sensorimotor Interactions to Integrative Spatial Encodings

Goal-oriented behavior requires reliable predictions regarding action outcomes. The theory of event segmentation and the free energy principle allow to derive hypotheses regarding the formation and maintenance of predictive models and their representational format. According to the free energy principle, cognitive systems constantly try to infer the causes of perceived sensations. This results in the formation of predictive models based on sensorimotor experience. Even if there is an ongoing debate regarding the representational format of these models, an integrative spatial code, which integrates different modalities in an abstract representation seems plausible. The integration process is assumed to be biased towards behaviorally relevant modalities. Moreover, a striving for consistency is assumed to maintain unambiguous states. Besides the representational format, the prediction process itself is of central interest. According to the event segmentation theory, cognitive systems segment the stream of sensorimotor information along significant changes, so-called event boundaries. Hence, it seems likely that predictions are carried out in terms of a simulation of the next, desired event boundary within the proposed integrative spatial code. The spatial code might support mental simulation in general, providing sensorimotor grounding to higher cognitive functions – as proposed by theories of embodied cognition. The proposed properties of the integrative spatial code were investigated in four studies, concerning the questions (i) whether multisensory integration is biased towards action-relevant modalities, (ii) how representations are kept consistent across frames of reference in case of multisensory conflict, (iii) if predictive models provide an anticipatory, event-like structure in the service of behavior control, and (iv) how different modalities are combined through a spatial code in the service of predictive simulations. The obtained results confirm the assumptions regarding the proposed integrative spatial code. The combination of the free energy principle and the theory of event segmentation seems a viable approach to account for the emergence of a predictive, integrative spatial code from sensorimotor interactions. The results allow the derivation of design principles for an artificial spatial reasoning system and the developed experimental paradigms allow further investigations of the causal role of spatial models in higher cognitive functions

Looking for language in space: spatial simulations in memory for language

Grounded-embodied theories hold that language is understood and remembered through perceptual and motor simulations (i.e., activations and re-activations of sensorimotor experiences). This thesis aims to illustrate simulations of space in memory for language. In four experiments, we explored (1) how individuals encode and re-activate word locations and (2) how word meanings activate locations in space (e.g., “bird” - upward location). Experiment 1 reveals that the propensity to refer to the environment during retrieval correlates with individual’s visuospatial memory capacity. Experiment 2 shows that words which are more difficult to remember and, particularly, words that are more difficult to visualise in mind lead to more reliance on the environment during word retrieval. Experiment 3, which is a norming study, demonstrates that there is a high degree of agreement among individuals when linking words to locations in space although there are no explicit conventions with regard to word - space associations. Experiment 4, in which recognition memory for words with spatial associations was probed, shows that both language-based simulation of space and simulation of word locations dictate memory performance even if space is irrelevant and unnecessary for successful retrieval. Results are discussed within grounded-embodied and extended approaches to memory and language