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Spring School on Language, Music, and Cognition: Organizing Events in Time
The interdisciplinary spring school âLanguage, music, and cognition: Organizing events in timeâ was held from February 26 to March 2, 2018 at the Institute of Musicology of the University of Cologne. Language, speech, and music as events in time were explored from different perspectives including evolutionary biology, social cognition, developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience of speech, language, and communication, as well as computational and biological approaches to language and music. There were 10 lectures, 4 workshops, and 1 student poster session.
Overall, the spring school investigated language and music as neurocognitive systems and focused on a mechanistic approach exploring the neural substrates underlying musical, linguistic, social, and emotional processes and behaviors. In particular, researchers approached questions concerning cognitive processes, computational procedures, and neural mechanisms underlying the temporal organization of language and music, mainly from two perspectives: one was concerned with syntax or structural representations of language and music as neurocognitive systems (i.e., an intrapersonal perspective), while the other emphasized social interaction and emotions in their communicative function (i.e., an interpersonal perspective). The spring school not only acted as a platform for knowledge transfer and exchange but also generated a number of important research questions as challenges for future investigations
Empathy, engagement, entrainment: the interaction dynamics of aesthetic experience
A recent version of the view that aesthetic experience is based in empathy as inner
imitation explains aesthetic experience as the automatic simulation of actions,
emotions, and bodily sensations depicted in an artwork by motor neurons in the brain. Criticizing the simulation theory for committing to an erroneous concept of empathy and failing to distinguish regular from aesthetic experiences of art, I advance an alternative, dynamic approach and claim that aesthetic experience is enacted and skillful, based in the recognition of othersâ experiences as distinct from oneâs own. In combining insights from mainly psychology, phenomenology, and cognitive science, the dynamic approach aims to explain the emergence of aesthetic experience in terms of the reciprocal interaction between viewer and artwork. I argue that aesthetic experience emerges by participatory sense-making and revolves around movement as a means for creating meaning. While entrainment merely plays a preparatory part in this, aesthetic engagement constitutes the phenomenological side of coupling to an artwork and provides the context for exploration, and eventually for moving, seeing, and feeling with art. I submit that aesthetic experience emerges from bodily and emotional engagement with works of art via the complementary processes of the perceptionâaction and motionâemotion loops. The former involves the embodied
visual exploration of an artwork in physical space, and progressively structures and organizes visual experience by way of perceptual feedback from body movements made in response to the artwork. The latter concerns the movement qualities and shapes of implicit and explicit bodily responses to an artwork that cue emotion and thereby modulate over-all affect and attitude. The two processes cause the viewer to bodily and emotionally move with and be moved by individual works of art, and consequently to recognize another psychological orientation than her own, which explains how art can cause feelings of insight or awe and disclose aspects of life that are unfamiliar or novel to the viewer
The songwriting coalface: where multiple intelligences collide
This paper investigates pedagogy around songwriting professional practice. Particular focus is given to the multiple intelligence theory of Howard Gardner as a lens through which to view songwriting practice, referenced to recent songwritingâspecific research (e.g. McIntyre, Bennett). Songwriting education provides some unique challenges; firstly, due to the qualitative nature of assessment and the complex and multiâfaceted nature of skills necessary (lyric writing, composing, recording, and performing), and secondly, in some lessâtangible capacities beneficial to the songwriter (creative skills, and nuanced choiceâmaking). From the perspective of songwriting education, Gardnerâs MI theory provides a âuseful fictionâ (his term) for knowledge transfer in the domain, especially (and for this researcher, surprisingly) in naturalistic intelligence
Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body
Review of Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind,
and Body London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005 (hardcover), 2006 (paperback).
ISBN13: 9780297643173 (hardcover) ÂŁ20.00. ISBN13: 9-780753820513
(paperback) ÂŁ9.99
Understanding confounding effects in linguistic coordination: an information-theoretic approach
We suggest an information-theoretic approach for measuring stylistic
coordination in dialogues. The proposed measure has a simple predictive
interpretation and can account for various confounding factors through proper
conditioning. We revisit some of the previous studies that reported strong
signatures of stylistic accommodation, and find that a significant part of the
observed coordination can be attributed to a simple confounding effect - length
coordination. Specifically, longer utterances tend to be followed by longer
responses, which gives rise to spurious correlations in the other stylistic
features. We propose a test to distinguish correlations in length due to
contextual factors (topic of conversation, user verbosity, etc.) and
turn-by-turn coordination. We also suggest a test to identify whether stylistic
coordination persists even after accounting for length coordination and
contextual factors
Human social evolution: self-domestication or self-control?
The self-domestication hypothesis suggests that, like mammalian domesticates, humans have gone through a process of selection against aggression â a process that in the case of humans was self-induced. Here, we extend previous proposals and suggest that what underlies human social evolution is selection for socially mediated emotional control and plasticity. In the first part of the paper we highlight general features of human social evolution, which, we argue, is more similar to that of other social mammals than to that of mammalian domesticates and is therefore incompatible with the notion of human self-domestication. In the second part, we discuss the unique aspects of human evolution and propose that emotional control and social motivation in humans evolved during two major, partially overlapping stages. The first stage, which followed the emergence of mimetic communication, the beginnings of musical engagement, and mimesis-related cognition, required socially mediated emotional plasticity and was accompanied by new social emotions. The second stage followed the emergence of language, when individuals began to instruct the imagination of their interlocutors, and to rely even more extensively on emotional plasticity and culturally learned emotional control. This account further illustrates the significant differences between humans and domesticates, thus challenging the notion of human self-domestication
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