Idiosyncratic Tower of Babel: Individual differences in word meaning representation increase along abstractness

Xiaosha, Wang; Bi, Yanchao

doi:10.1101/2020.08.28.272997

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…from the sighted to quite different, suggesting that additional sensory experience may reduce idiosyncrasy (see also [33]). The critical point these results make is that humans can form knowledge space about a particular sensory property in the complete absence of that sensory experience, in ways perfectly supporting behavioral probing through questions and answers via language, like in a Turing test scenario [34].…”

Section: Trends In Cognitive Sciencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dual coding of knowledge in the human brain

2021

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

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How does the human brain code knowledge about the world? While disciplines such as artificial intelligence represent world knowledge based on human language, neurocognitive models of knowledge have been dominated by sensory embodiment, in which knowledge is derived from sensory/motor experience and supported by high-level sensory/motor and association cortices. The neural correlates of an alternative disembodied symbolic system had previously been difficult to establish. A recent line of studies exploring knowledge about visual properties, such as color, in visually deprived individuals converge to provide positive, compelling evidence for non-sensory, language-derived, knowledge representation in dorsal anterior temporal lobe and extended language network, in addition to the sensory-derived representations, leading to a sketch of a dualcoding knowledge neural framework.(A human to an android): There was a thought experiment they gave us. It's called 'Mary in a Black and White room.' Mary is a scientist, and her special subject is color. She knows everything there is to know about it […] But she lives in a black and white room. She was born there, raised there […] One day… Mary walks out and she sees a blue sky. And at that moment she learns something that all her studies couldn't tell her. She learns what it feels to see color. The thought experiment was to show the students the difference between a computer and a human mind. The computer is Mary in the black and white room. The human is when she walks out. -Ex Machina (a Movie, 2014), citing [1]. Knowledge representation: sensorial versus symbolic notions granted by different disciplinesWhat does it mean, to know? Is knowing supported by symbolic relations versus knowing through sensory experience (see Glossary) the difference between (current) machines and humans, as suggested in the earlier movie dialogue?The human brain stores vast amounts of knowledge about the world, such as the color of roses, the shape of the earth, the mechanisms of evolution, and the functions of a jury. Various sorts of knowledge guide a broad range of behaviors, from recognizing objects to understanding words, reasoning, and decision making. Understanding how world knowledge is represented is one of the oldest and most-debated questions in any discipline interested in the mind and brain. The discussions in every field, including philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science, center on two broad notions of representing knowledge: symbolic versus embodied (sensory/ motor-experience-derived). The symbolic representation, granted by Mary in the black and white room in the thought experiment earlier [1], is the prevalent way to represent knowledge in artificial intelligence. Beyond computers, similar notions have also been assumed in various cognitive (e.g., dual coding by both verbal and nonverbal [2,3]) and philosophical theories (e.g., dualism [4]). Despite this popularity in some areas, neurocognitive (biological) models of knowledge implementation are more strongly influenced by the ...

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Section: Trends In Cognitive Sciencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dual coding of knowledge in the human brain

2021

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

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“…The behavioral data of one delayed signer were excluded from data analysis due to technical errors. The behavioral and neural data of 21 out of the 33 hearing college students overlapped with a previous study (Wang and Bi, 2021) that examined the intersubject variability of semantics in typically developed populations.…”

Section: Participantsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Early-life language deprivation affects specific neural mechanisms of semantic representations

Xiaosha

Asan

2022

Preprint

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One signature of the human brain is its ability to derive knowledge from language inputs, in addition to nonlinguistic sensory channels such as vision and touch. How does human language experience specifically modulate the way in which semantic knowledge is stored in the human brain? We investigated this question using a unique early-life language-deprivation human model: early deaf adults who are born to hearing parents and thus had delayed acquisition of any natural human language (speech or sign), with early deaf adults who acquired sign language from birth as nonlinguistic sensory experience controls. Neural responses in a meaning judgment task with 90 written words that were familiar to both groups were measured using fMRI. The early language-deprived group, compared with the deaf control group, showed reduced semantic sensitivity, in both multivariate pattern (semantic structure encoding) and univariate (abstractness effect) analyses, in the left dorsal anterior temporal lobe (dATL). These results provide positive, causal evidence that the neural semantic representation in dATL is specifically supported by language, as a unique mechanism of representing (abstract) semantic space, beyond the sensory-derived semantic representations distributed in the other cortical regions.

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Idiosyncratic Tower of Babel: Individual differences in word meaning representation increase along abstractness

Cited by 2 publications

References 35 publications

Dual coding of knowledge in the human brain

Dual coding of knowledge in the human brain

Early-life language deprivation affects specific neural mechanisms of semantic representations

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