Clustering of affective categories in scandinavian and romance languages

[Abstract] Cross-cultural comparable data collected in several Romance and Scandinavian languages with the help of a series of tasks inspired by Fehr and Rusell’s prototype approach to emotions are analyzed from a perspective that goes beyond the interpretation of prototype theory and aligns with the theorybased approaches to categorization (cfr. the seminal paper by Murphy and Medin 1985). Due to space limitations, only the data obtained with the help of a supplemented version of the traditional free-listing task will be considered here. Special attention is devoted, not as much to frequency of mention, order of mention and indexes of salience – parameters that are usually discussed in categorization and cultural domain studies – but first and foremost to the patterns of clustering and the relationships holding between the various categories mentioned by every single informant and across the lists, as made obvious by the data. Domain access point is identified as a privileged position that tends to coincide with categories promoting richest conceptual connections with other category members, while the prevailing relationships between mentioned categories appear to be metonymic, metaphoric, similarity or contras

The Evolution of Primate Short-Term Memory.

Short-term memory is implicated in a range of cognitive abilities and is critical for understanding primate cognitive evolution. To investigate the effects of phylogeny, ecology and sociality on short-term memory, we tested the largest and most diverse primate sample to date (421 non-human primates across 41 species) in an experimental delayed-response task. Our results confirm previous findings that longer delays decrease memory performance across species and taxa. Our analyses demonstrate a considerable contribution of phylogeny over ecological and social factors on the distribution of short-term memory performance in primates; closely related species had more similar short-term memory abilities. Overall, individuals in the branch of Hominoidea performed better compared to Cercopithecoidea, who in turn performed above Platyrrhini and Strepsirrhini. Interdependencies between phylogeny and socioecology of a given species presented an obstacle to disentangling the effects of each of these factors on the evolution of short-term memory capacity. However, this study offers an important step forward in understanding the interspecies and individual variation in short-term memory ability by providing the first phylogenetic reconstruction of this trait’s evolutionary history. The dataset constitutes a unique resource for studying the evolution of primate cognition and the role of short-term memory in other cognitive abilities.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Evolution of Primate Short-Term Memory

Short-term memory is implicated in a range of cognitive abilities and is critical for understanding primate cognitive evolution. To investigate the effects of phylogeny, ecology and sociality on short-term memory, we tested the largest and most diverse primate sample to date (421 non-human primates across 41 species) in an experimental delayed-response task. Our results confirm previous findings that longer delays decrease memory performance across species and taxa. Our analyses demonstrate a considerable contribution of phylogeny over ecological and social factors on the distribution of short-term memory performance in primates; closely related species had more similar short-term memory abilities. Overall, individuals in the branch of Hominoidea performed better compared to Cercopithecoidea, who in turn performed above Platyrrhini and Strepsirrhini. Interdependencies between phylogeny and socioecology of a given species presented an obstacle to disentangling the effects of each of these factors on the evolution of short-term memory capacity. However, this study offers an important step forward in understanding the interspecies and individual variation in short-term memory ability by providing the first phylogenetic reconstruction of this trait’s evolutionary history. The dataset constitutes a unique resource for studying the evolution of primate cognition and the role of short-term memory in other cognitive abilities

The Role of Metaphor in the Structuring of Emotion Concepts

Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) is one of the most prolific frameworks in the study of emotion concepts. Following the seminal work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and subsequent work by Kövecses (1986, 1990) and Kövecses and Lakoff (1987), an impressive number of studies in cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics have sought to document and confirm the claim that conceptual metaphor (CM) structures affective concepts. I attempt a brief overview of CMT claims about and CMT-inspired research on emotion concepts. I continue by presenting a study based on data collected in six languages, to assess the role of CM in the structuring of emotion concepts. I introduce the procedure, the corpus, and the analyses that have been carried out, including a detailed discussion of the considerations that informed the coding decisions applied to the corpus in a tentative quantitative analysis. Finally, I highlight a series of difficulties and controversies raised by CMT-driven analysis of emotion concepts that could be employed in hypothesis-driven experiments to test conceptual processing claims made within CMT

Making sense of "anomalous" vocalizations

The category of interjections is claimed to be universally encountered across languages of the world; this status, however, does not exempt it of a most troubled linguistic history. Interjections have been classifieds both as word-like and sentence- (or utterance-) –like; they have been denied linguistic status or exiled at the periphery of language as a bizarre, primitive form of communication, as pseudo-linguistic devices or as arbitrary performance errors. With the raise of functional and interactional approaches, interjections have been welcomed back to language in spite of their anomalous phonology (including sounds or phonotactic units at odds with language specific phonological restrictions), anomalous morpho-syntactic behaviour (normally, interjections do not enter syntactic relationships), apparent lack of semantics (what an interjection “means” changes dramatically from one context to another) and almost total absence from written, solipsistic discourse (since spoken or online interactions are the realm of interjections). The successive attempts of defining and describing the nature of interjections generated conceptual and terminological polemics which makes it difficult to establish the place of interjections in the linguistic system. More recent approaches have underlined their border-nature, both intra- (as amenable to cover functions attributed to other word classes), and extra-linguistically (through shared features with holophrastic communication systems and, especially, with gestural communication). Other studies yet have stressed the universality across languages of the world (some even establishing a parallel to nonhuman primate vocalizations) of the inventory of interjectional vocalization and their approximate functions, giving support to the interjectional theory of the origin of language. Drawing on a detailed conversational and cognitive analysis of the 12 most frequent primary interjections (i.e. vocalizations of the type ah, eh, oh, etc.) in Romanian and Italian, as established by their occurrence in an extensive corpus of spontaneous interactions in each language (both personal and published), but also on a broad array of secondary data in a variety of other languages, it is the aim of this paper to elucidate how we make sense of interjections (by taking into account, among others, specific communicative goals and social cognitive processes) and to dissect closely how these “anomalous” cries are the locus where natural, universal tendencies and local cultural-linguistic specificities meet. Finally, and related to the issues above, a third and most important question to address is why, when languages of the world have developed into such sophisticated systems of communication that would not favour ambiguity (cfr. Grice’s maxims, for instance), people still make wide use in everyday interaction of such a holistic, signal-like form of communication, which unlike symbolic verbal human communication is symptomatic of a cued- (as opposed to a detached-) kind of representation? Considering that interjection sense-making is so difficult to theorize and every new study on interjections is virtually yet another new approach to interjections, how come laymen cannot make it without them and do not seem to put much effort when making sense of interjections

Chimpanzees predict the hedonic outcome of novel taste combinations : The evolutionary origins of affective forecasting

Affective forecasting - predicting the emotional outcome of never-before experienced situations - is pervasive in our lives. When facing novel situations, we can quickly integrate bits and pieces of prior experiences to envisage possible scenarios and their outcomes, and what these might feel like. Such affective glimpses of the future often steer the decisions we make. By enabling principled decision-making in novel situations, affective forecasting confers the important adaptive advantage of eluding the potentially costly consequences of tackling such situations by trial-and-error. Affective forecasting has been hypothesized as uniquely human, yet, in a recent study we found suggestive evidence of this ability in an orangutan. To test nonverbal subjects, we capitalized on culinary examples of affective forecasting and devised a behavioral test that required the subjects to make predictions about novel juice mixes produced from familiar ingredients. In the present study, we administered the same task to two chimpanzees and found that their performance was comparable to that of the previously tested orangutan and 10 humans, who served as a comparison group. To improve the comparability of human and animal performance, in the present study we also introduced a new approach to assessing if the subjects’ performance was indicative of affective forecasting, which relies exclusively on behavioral data. The results of the study open for the possibility that affective forecasting has evolved in the common ancestor of the great apes, providing Hominids with the adaptive advantage of e.g. quickly evaluating heterogeneous food patches using hedonic prediction

Chimpanzees like to copy human visitors to the zoo - Ig Nobel prize

How good is your best chimpanzee impression? Go to the zoo and you probably wouldn’t be surprised to see people copying chimpanzees in order to grab their attention. But our latest research, which recently won the Ig Nobel Prize for Anthropology, suggests you are just as likely to see chimpanzees imitating the human visitors