Action Alters Shape Categories

Smith, Linda B.

doi:10.1207/s15516709cog0000_13

Cited by 128 publications

(83 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…However, the outline I have provided needs to be connected to research concerning how infants form object concepts (see e.g. Carey 1985Carey , 2009Landau et al 1998;Mandler 2004;Smith 2005;Spelke 2000Spelke , 2004). …”

Section: Object Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example for functional categories, such as chairs and watches, children also use the actions performed by an object as a cue to its categorization, in addition to shape and other static domains (see, for example, Smith 2005;Gärdenfors (2007)). Carey (2009, 275) argues that infatns sometimes categorize on the basis of global kind rather than by perceptual similarity.…”

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confidence: 99%

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From Sensations to Concepts: a Proposal for Two Learning Processes

Gärdenfors

2018

Rev.Phil.Psych.

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This article presents two learning processes in order to explain how children at an early age can transform a complex sensory input to concepts and categories. The first process constructs the perceptual structures that emerge in children's cognitive development by detecting invariants in the sensory input. The invariant structures involve a reduction in dimensionality of the sensory information. It is argued that this process generates the primary domains of space, objects and actions and that these domains can be represented as conceptual spaces. Once the primary domains have been established, the second process utilizes covariances between different dimensions of the domains in order to identify natural clusters of entities. The clusters are then are used to determine concepts as regions in the spaces. As an application, the processes are used to resolve the so-called 'complex first paradox' that emerges from the fact that children, in general, learn nouns earlier than adjectives, even though nouns are semantically more complex than adjectives. The Blooming, Buzzing ConfusionOur sensory influx is extremely rich. For example, whenever we open our eyes, there is a constantly fluctuating wash of light captured on our retinas. It is something of a miracle that our brains manage to sort up the sensory information and immediately identify and categorize a vast number of entities in our surroundings. The miracle becomes even larger when it is considered that these categories must be learned from experience. The learning process is rapid, which is witnessed, among other things, by the fact that children start communicating about the categories after about a year. The following famous quote from William James' Principles of Psychology (James 1890, 462) expresses the problem elegantly:Rev.Phil.Psych.

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Section: Object Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

From Sensations to Concepts: a Proposal for Two Learning Processes

Gärdenfors

2018

Rev.Phil.Psych.

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“…Additionally, the perceptual representation of abstract concepts might be important for the way children learn concepts (e.g., Smith, 2005). The conceptual system has been argued to develop simultaneously and in parallel with the perceptual and motor systems (Mandler, 1992(Mandler, , 2004, and many global and abstract concepts are built on image-schema's that are derived from concrete experiences.…”

Section: Practical Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Abstract Concepts in Grounded Cognition

Lakens¹

2017

Preprint

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concepts in grounded cognitionAbstracte concepten in gegronde cognitie References 115 Summary in Dutch 133Curriculum Vitae 139 5 Introduction M orality, time, and valence are highly abstract concepts. Exactly how people are able to think and talk about abstract concepts is a question that has intrigued philosophers and scientists for centuries. In this thesis I focus on the question how people represent the meaning of abstract concepts, by investigating whether abstract concepts are understood through the use of metaphors. Metaphors allow people to think about abstract concepts in terms of concrete experiences. For example, the scales of Lady Justice are a metaphor for justice. People might not be able to see the future, but it can be represented as being ahead of us. Black knights in fairytales are usually evil, and the color of their armor is a metaphoric representation of the relation they have with the knights in shining armor. These and similar metaphors are not only used to intentionally communicate the meaning of abstract concepts, but these metaphoric representations also underlie abstract conceptual thought. How the meaning of abstract concepts is grounded in concrete experiences is the topic of this dissertation.Broadly speaking, two views exist on how abstract concepts are represented in our mind. On the one hand, amodal views share the common theme that people think in a purely symbolic language, where concepts 6 are represented as artificial symbols, and computational operations are performed upon these symbols during conceptual processing (Dennett, 1969;Fodor, 1975;Pylyshyn, 1984;Jackendoff, 2002). These artificial symbols are inherently non-perceptual; none of the original sensory or motor information from any modality (e.g., vision, touch, sound, smell, etc) which created these symbols is present when the final amodal symbols are used to represent concepts. On the other hand, several views on the representation of concepts have emerged over the last decennium which all share the idea that conceptual processing is perceptual in nature (e.g., Barsalou, 1999;Gallese & Lakoff, 2005;Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002;Jeannerod, 2001;Pulvermüller, 1999;Zwaan, 2004). According to these grounded approaches to cognition, conceptual thought consists of representations built on concrete sensorimotor information. For example, understanding the word 'kick' is assumed to depend at least in part on the activation of the muscles used to perform a kicking motion.As a result of the growing number of empirical studies that have investigated the role of sensorimotor activation in language comprehension, a consensus is emerging that sensorimotor areas in the brain are activated when people read words related to concrete concepts (Zwaan, 2009;Mahon & Caramazza, 2009;Vigliocco & Meteyard, 2008). For example, thinking about the color of a banana activates brain areas in the visual cortex (Simmons, Ramjee, Beauchamp, McRae, Martin, & Barsalou, 2007). Thinking about the color of a banana leads to remarkably similar pattern...

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“…Speaker's actions upon a named object not only improve learning, they also influence how a novel word is conceptualized (Hall, Williams, & Bélanger, 2010;Kobayashi, 1998;Smith, 2005). For example, children use a speaker's action upon a novel part of a novel object in order to determine that he is naming the (acted upon) part rather than the whole (nameless) object (Kobayashi, 1998).…”

Section: Action Emotion and Intonationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The pragmatics of word learning

Grassmann¹

2014

Pragmatic Development in First Language Acquisition

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The reason for the basic role of observations […] (Quine, 1974: 37) Children use and integrate a variety of information when learning novel words. Most strikingly, children are skillful in drawing inferences about speakers' intentions. This chapter reviews the current state of affairs regarding the wide variety of pragmatic information that children employ in word learning. Current debates on whether seemingly pragmatic phenomena in word learning should be explained by simpler processes are addressed throughout the chapter. Suggestions for future research directions are made. Finally, I suggest that in order to acknowledge the role that pragmatic information plays in word learning, the field needs to come to an agreement on what it is that children acquire in word learning: word-object/concept-associations or means to communicate and direct other's attention to certain objects?

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Action Alters Shape Categories

Cited by 128 publications

References 33 publications

From Sensations to Concepts: a Proposal for Two Learning Processes

From Sensations to Concepts: a Proposal for Two Learning Processes

Abstract Concepts in Grounded Cognition

The pragmatics of word learning

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