4,956 research outputs found

    The influence of visual perspective on the cognitive effort required for mental representation

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    Mental representation is the process by which an individual simulates an event in their mind’s eye. This process is the foundation of the ability to remember the past, engage in prospective thinking, or imagine fictitious scenarios. An individual can mentally represent any event through their own eyes—the first-person perspective or from the viewpoint of an external observer—the third-person perspective. The perspective of representation influences outcomes related to memory, visuospatial processing, affect, social cognition, clinical diagnoses, and language processing. In turn, an individual’s tendency to favour either perspective is shaped by related factors. The current research consists of four experiments, designed to characterize and contrast the electrophysiological correlates of mental representation from each perspective and the associated cognitive load. To this end, electroencephalography (EEG) was used to capture changes in slow-cortical potentials (SCPs), while participants formed mental representations based on short sentences, from either visual perspective. SCPs have a longer duration than other event-related potentials (ERPs) and originate primarily in the cortex; SCP negativity was used to index the cognitive load associated with mental representation. Experiment 1 showed that third-person perspective imagining required more cognitive effort and that switching from the first- to the third-person perspective required more cognitive effort than performing the opposite switch. This difference was primarily observed in prefrontal electrodes, leading up to the perspective switch, at which point the effect the effect was observed across all but occipital electrodes. Third-person perspective events were rated as being easier to imagine when initially generated from the first-person perspective. Experiment 2 showed that concurrently manipulating personal pronouns and perspective cues did not effect reliable differences in SCP amplitudes but did influence the vividness of objects, locations, emotions, and the sense of touch. Experiments 3a and 3b showed that (morphosyntactic-given) temporal information modulated the impact of perspective on SCPs, during autobiographical memory (AM) retrieval/maintenance. Following perfective (but not imperfective) accomplishment cues, vividness ratings were higher for the first-person perspective. Discussions further interpret and contextualize these novel results. Together, the current experiments showed that SCP amplitudes differentiated between first- and third-person perspective mental representation, but the timeline and magnitude of the observed differences varied greatly across experiments based on the influences of perspective-switching, lexical aspect (activities versus accomplishments), grammatical aspect (imperfective versus perfective), personal pronouns (“I” versus “He”/“She”), and type of mental representation (imagined events versus autobiographical memories). These variations occurred despite the consistency of the experimental stimuli and their presentation, across all experiments. As such, recommendations are provided for greater control of these factors in further SCP-based research

    Linking language and emotion: how emotion is understood in language comprehension, production and prediction using psycholinguistic methods

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    Emotions are an integral part of why and how we use language in everyday life. We communicate our concerns, express our woes, and share our joy through the use of non-verbal and verbal language. Yet there is a limited understanding of when and how emotional language is processed differently to neutral language, or of how emotional information facilitates or inhibits language processing. Indeed, various efforts have been made to bring back emotions into the discipline of psycholinguistics in the last decade. This can be seen in many interdisciplinary models focusing on the role played by emotion in each aspect of linguistic experience. In this thesis, I answer this call and pursue questions that remain unanswered in psycholinguistics regarding its interaction with emotion. The general trend that I am using to bring emotion into psycholinguistic research is straightforward. Where applicable and relevant, I use well-established tasks or paradigms to investigate the effects of emotional content in language processing. Hence, I focused on three main areas of language processing: comprehension, production and prediction. The first experimental chapter includes a series of experiments utilising the Modality Switching Paradigm to investigate whether sentences describing emotional states are processed differently from sentences describing cognitive states. No switching effects were found consistently in my 3 experiments. My results suggest that these distinct classes of interoceptive concepts, such as ‘thinking’ or ‘being happy’, are not processed differently from each other, suggesting that people do not switch attention between different interoceptive systems when comprehending emotional or cognitive sentences. I discuss the implications for grounded cognition theory in the embodiment literature. In my second experimental chapter, I used the Cumulative Semantic Interference Paradigm to investigate these two questions: (1) whether emotion concepts interfere with one another when repeatedly retrieved (emotion label objects), and (2) whether similar interference occurs for concrete objects that share similar valence association (emotion-laden objects). This could indicate that people use information such as valence and arousal to group objects in semantic memory. I found that interference occurs when people retrieve direct emotion labels repeatedly (e.g., “happy” and “sad”) but not when they retrieve the names of concrete objects that have similar emotion connotations (e.g., “puppy” and “rainbow”). I discuss my findings in terms of the different types of information that support representation of abstract vs. concrete concepts. In my final experimental chapter, I used the Visual World Paradigm to investigate whether the emotional state of an agent is used to inform predictions during sentence processing. I found that people do use the description of emotional state of an agent (e.g., “The boy is happy”) to predict the cause of that affective state during sentence processing (e.g., “because he was given an ice-cream”). A key result here is that people were more likely to fixate on the emotionally congruent objects (e.g., ice-cream) compared to incongruent objects (e.g., broccoli). This suggests that people rapidly and automatically inform predictions about upcoming sentence information based on the emotional state of the agent. I discuss our findings as a novel contribution to the Visual World literature. I conducted a diverse set of experiments using a range of established psycholinguistic methods to investigate the roles of emotional information in language processing. I found clear results in the eye-tracking study but inconsistent effects in both switching and interference studies. I interpret these mixed findings in the following way: emotional content does not always have effects in language processing and that effect are most likely in tasks that explicitly require participants to simulate emotion states in some way. Regardless, not only was I successful in finding some novel results by extending previous tasks, but I was also able to show that this is an avenue that can be explored more to advance the affective psycholinguistic field

    Displacement and the Humanities: Manifestos from the Ancient to the Present

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    This is the final version. Available on open access from MDPI via the DOI in this recordThis is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787) (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/special_issues/Manifestos Ancient Present)This volume brings together the work of practitioners, communities, artists and other researchers from multiple disciplines. Seeking to provoke a discourse around displacement within and beyond the field of Humanities, it positions historical cases and debates, some reaching into the ancient past, within diverse geo-chronological contexts and current world urgencies. In adopting an innovative dialogic structure, between practitioners on the ground - from architects and urban planners to artists - and academics working across subject areas, the volume is a proposition to: remap priorities for current research agendas; open up disciplines, critically analysing their approaches; address the socio-political responsibilities that we have as scholars and practitioners; and provide an alternative site of discourse for contemporary concerns about displacement. Ultimately, this volume aims to provoke future work and collaborations - hence, manifestos - not only in the historical and literary fields, but wider research concerned with human mobility and the challenges confronting people who are out of place of rights, protection and belonging

    Embodiment of infinity in mathematics

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    In this article, we discuss the embodiment of infinity as one of fundamental concepts in mathematics. In contrast to the embodiment of many other mathematical concepts, the embodiment of infinity is an endless dynamic process. In embodying +∞, an object moves rightward toward a previously-set limit and passes it. Then, a new limit is set on the right side of the moving object. The moving object continues its movement and passes it as well. The moving object can pass any limit. In other words, there is no impassable limit for it. In embodying -∞, a similar process happens but the movement is leftward. Embodiment of infinitely small quantities has a basic similarity to the embodiment of infinitely large quantities, although it is different in some respects. We call the embodiment of infinity as iterative embodiment. It is iterative because the process of setting a new limit and passing it is repeated endlessly. Finally, it is suggested that in the process of embodying infinitely large and infinitely small quantities, the visual system and the motor system play important roles, as this process involves spatial concepts and movement

    Is there a Relationship between Parents' Screen Usage and Young Children’s Development?

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    There has been growing concern over the links between children's screen time use and cognitive development (Halton, 2020). However, researchers have generally overlooked the possible impact of parental screen time, which might decrease the opportunities of learning and social interactions for young children. To address this gap, we investigated the relationship between parental screen use and toddlers’ development. However, the start of this thesis coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic, and a few experimental tasks had to be adapted online. Thus, this thesis examined first whether online paradigms can provide valid data (word recognition, word learning and language assessment). Second, the main objective was to explore the relationship between parental screen use and young children’s language skills, and to revisit the link between parental screen time and children’s empathy. Findings from Chapter 2 provide support for the reliability of online testing with children. These experiments point to promising avenues of investigation in early language studies, and to possibilities for reaching out to families around the world. Findings from Chapter 3 revealed no impact of parental phone text on children’s learning in a lab situation. However, they suggest that parental responses to technoference and attitudes towards smartphones may moderate the relationship between parental screen use and children’s development. When examining effects in real life, a first exploratory study indicated an effect of parental screen time (in real life) on children’s language vocabulary when assessed via a parental questionnaire, at least for children aged 16 months and above. A second study was conducted with more objective measures of screen time and children’s vocabulary knowledge, and no association was found between parental screen time and children’s language when assessed via a standardised face-to-face language test. Findings from Chapter 4 showed a negative association between children’s alone screen time and their cognitive empathy abilities. However, parental screen time was not related to children’s cognitive empathy. The experiments and studies reported in this thesis fail to reveal a robust association between parental screen time and early language, at least in the population that we have studied here. Importantly, the findings suggest how parental screen use may be a moderator in children’s development and not a causal factor. They demonstrate the need to investigate more precisely why and how parents use electronic devices such as mobile phones during interactions with their children, might directly influence early language and emotional development

    The Roles of Mathematical Metaphors and Gestures in the Understanding of Abstract Mathematical Concepts

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    When a new mathematical idea is presented to students in terms of abstract mathematical symbols, they may have difficulty to grasp it. This difficulty arises because abstract mathematical symbols do not directly refer to concretely perceivable objects. But, when the same content is presented in the form of a graph or a gesture that depicts that graph, it is often much easier to grasp. The process of solving a complex mathematical problem can also be facilitated with the use of a graphical representation. Transforming a mathematical problem or concept into a graphical representation is a common problem solving strategy, and we may view it as a kind of mathematical metaphor, which is common strategy for solving mathematical problems. This process is a metaphor because, in the sense that a certain representation of a mathematical problem is described in terms of a visual representation of that problem. Furthermore, since a graphical representation is visual, it can be depicted by gestures. Therefore, visual and motor systems can be actively employed to process a given problem and find a solution for it. In this way, mathematical metaphor offers us a way to employ a wider range of cognitive resources to understand mathematics

    Patterns and Variation in English Language Discourse

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    The publication is reviewed post-conference proceedings from the international 9th Brno Conference on Linguistics Studies in English, held on 16–17 September 2021 and organised by the Faculty of Education, Masaryk University in Brno. The papers revolve around the themes of patterns and variation in specialised discourses (namely the media, academic, business, tourism, educational and learner discourses), effective interaction between the addressor and addressees and the current trends and development in specialised discourses. The principal methodological perspectives are the comparative approach involving discourses in English and another language, critical and corpus analysis, as well as identification of pragmatic strategies and appropriate rhetorical means. The authors of papers are researchers from the Czech Republic, Italy, Luxembourg, Serbia and Georgia

    Introduction to Psychology

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    Introduction to Psychology is a modified version of Psychology 2e - OpenStax

    Sifat Alami Gramatika Indonesia: Sistem Partikel Linguistik, Fungsi Penataan Konseptual, dan Representasi Kognitif

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    Our article aims to characterize the conceptual architecture of Indonesian grammar theoretically through a cognitive semantic approach. In its implementation, we applied introspective reflection on language data in the form of sentences that have been collected into a corpus. Applying the Conceptual Structuring System (Talmy, 2000b), we introspected the semantic function of grammar elements and their coherence with lexical elements that constitute sentences. We propose that conceptualization in the Indonesian language relies on the system of pairing and connecting morphemes, or what will be regarded here as linguistic particles. In other words, a sentence is a composition of complex particles that externalizes the organization of ideas, thoughts, or concepts as a predication construed into cognitive representations in the form of event schemas. Furthermore, the conceptual organization expressed as predication configures conceptual meaning with respect to spatiotemporal domains. This article sheds light on the cognitive architecture that conceptualizes Indonesian grammar, contributing to a deeper understanding of its structural characteristics and the experience of language meaning-making.  AbstrakPenelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengkarakterisasikan arsitektur konseptual gramatika Indonesia secara teoretis melalui pendekatan semantik kognitif. Pada pelaksanaannya peneliti menerapkan refleksi introspektif atas data bahasa berupa kalimat yang telah dikumpulkan ke dalam korpus. Menerapkan Sistem Penataan Konseptual (Talmy, 2000b), peneliti mengintrospeksi fungsi semantik unsur gramatika dan kesinambungannya dengan unsur leksikal yang mengkonstitusikan kalimat. Peneliti memproposisikan konseptualisasi dalam bahasa Indonesia bertumpu pada sistem pemasangan dan penghubungan morfem atau apa yang akan disebut di sini sebagai partikel linguistik. Dalam kata lain, kalimat adalah susunan partikel kompleks yang mengeksternalisasikan organisasi ide, pikiran, atau konsep sebagai sebuah predikasi yang ditafsirkan ke dalam representasi kognitif berupa skema kejadian. Selanjutnya, organisasi konseptual yang dinyatakan sebagai predikasi mengkonfigurasi makna konseptual berdasarkan domain ruang dan waktu. Artikel ini mencerahkan arsitektur kognitif yang dikonseptualisasikan gramatika Indonesia, dalam cara yang mengkontribusikan pemahaman lebih dalam tentang karakteristik struktural dan pengalaman pemaknaan bahasa
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