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The similarity-in-topography principle: Reconciling theories of conceptual deficits
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Three theories currently compete to explain the conceptual deficits that result from brain damage: sensory-functional theory, domain-specific theory, and conceptual structure theory. We argue that all three theories capture important aspects of conceptual deficits, and offer different insights into their origins. Conceptual topography theory (CTT) integrates these insights, beginning with A. R. Damasio's (1989) convergence zone theory and elaborating it with the similarity-in-topography (SIT) principle. According to CTT, feature maps in sensory-motor systems represent the features of a category's exemplars. A hierarchical system of convergence zones then conjoins these features to form both property and category representations. According to the SIT principle, the proximity of two conjunctive neurons in a convergence zone increases with the similarity of the features they conjoin. As a result, conjunctive neurons become topographically organised into local regions that represent properties and categories. Depending on the level and location of a lesion in this system, a wide variety of deficits is possible. Consistent with the literature, these deficits range from the loss of a single category to the loss of multiple categories that share sensory-motor properties.
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... On the one hand, at least some aspects of how a situation is captured and simulated need to be significantly constrained by genetic factors. Simmons and Barsalou (2003) comment that conjunctive neurons are combined to anticipate features that are of evolutionary significance in the cases of many animals. They further suggest that a similar mechanism works for human beings because we associate certain words with their encoded meanings, emotional expressions with emotions, and motor actions with visual outcomes. ...
This thesis proposes a dual-route processing approach to the comprehension of poetic metaphor according to which mental imagery imposes procedural constraints on conceptual mental representations and thus contributes to inferencing the communicator’s intention. It seeks to develop the relevance theory account on the role of non-propositional effects in verbal communication allowing the incorporation of mental images, impressions, emotions, and other sensations.
A review of major contemporary approaches to metaphor gives a good reason to favour the relevance-theoretic treatment that describes verbal comprehension as an inferential process. Representations of a set of assumptions are accessed to provide premises and result in conclusions following logical rules, or at least warranted by the premises. According to this view, metaphor is not fundamentally different from other uses of natural language: both require lexical pragmatic adjustments of the encoded concept in order to construct an occasion-specific concept whose denotation partially overlaps that of the original. This new concept resembles the communicator’s thought, and gives access to assumptions which will derive implications to make the utterance relevant-as-expected.
Relevance theory regards non-propositional effects as the result of the communication of a wide array of weak but equally plausible implicated propositions. The account developed here considers alternative approaches to non-propositionality from affective science, grounded cognition, and Classical Chinese philosophy. After reworking the definition of mental imagery, it is suggested that non-propositional elements are not just triggered by linguistic processing but they also act as inputs to relevant cognitive activities. More specifically, imagery directs the hearer’s attention towards certain aspects of the metaphor by ‘pointing to’ constituents from personal history and bodily experience that perceptually resemble the sensory inputs from the represented object. Imagery contributes to understanding what the speaker intends to convey, using feedforward and feedback information to guide and constrain the search for relevance. This model therefore complements a purely propositional inferential model.
By highlighting the ways in which mental imagery may affect inference, this thesis attempts to expand the scope of pragmatics. A comprehensive pragmatic theory of verbal communication should be able to account for the communication of not just thoughts with propositional forms but also non-propositional elements. Furthermore, the proposal may have some implications for literary studies of poetic metaphor by drawing attention to the cognitive dimensions involved in what is often treated in literary studies as intuitive and spontaneous.
... largely posterior to PHT, involving areas FST, TPOJ2, and several extrastriate parcels surrounding the MT complex (V4t, LO3, and TPOJ3), although there is also involvement of the posterior aspect of PHT. This proximity between areas showing category preferences for images and category preferences for words is consistent with a longstanding view of cortical organization in which sensory processing streams represent information in increasingly conjunctive and abstract form with greater distance from primary cortex (Damasio 1989;Tanaka 1996;Mesulam 1998;Simmons and Barsalou 2003). Recent work by Popham et al. (2021) provides similar evidence that visually-and verbally-elicited representations of object categories are aligned spatially near the occipitotemporal border, with verbally-elicited representations immediately anterior to representations elicited by object pictures (Orlov et al. 2010). ...
... Although concepts certainly reflect experience, they also have strong biological bases that scaffold learning. There is no a priori reason why grounded conceptual structures cannot have a strong genetic basis, especially in the sensory-motor feature and association areas that underlie them (e.g., Hoenig, Müller, Herrnberger, Spitzer, Ehret, & Kiefer, 2011;Kiefer et al., 2007;Simmons & Barsalou, 2003). ...
An overview of today's diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to action and the relationship of action and cognition.
The emerging field of action science is characterized by a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches that share the basic functional belief that evolution has optimized cognitive systems to serve the demands of action. This book brings together the constitutive approaches of action science in a single source, covering the relation of action to such cognitive functions as perception, attention, memory, and volition. Each chapter offers a tutorial-like description of a major line of inquiry, written by a leading scientist in the field. Taken together, the chapters reflect a dynamic and rapidly growing field and provide a forum for comparison and possible integration of approaches.
After discussing core questions about how actions are controlled and learned, the book considers ecological approaches to action science; neurocogntive approaches to action understanding and attention; developmental approaches to action science; social actions, including imitation and joint action; and the relationships between action and the conceptual system (grounded cognition) and between volition and action.
An emerging discipline depends on a rich and multifaceted supply of theoretical and methodological approaches. The diversity of perspectives offered in this book will serve as a guide for future explorations in action science.
Contributors Lawrence W. Barsalou, Miriam Beisert, Valerian Chambon, Thomas Goschke, Patrick Haggard, Arvid Herwig, Herbert Heuer, Cecilia Heyes, Bernhard Hommel, Glyn W. Humphreys, Richard B. Ivry, Markus Kiefer, Günther Knoblich, Sally A. Linkenauger, Janeen D. Loehr, Peter J. Marshall, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Wolfgang Prinz, Dennis R. Proffitt, Giacomo Rizzolatti, David A. Rosenbaum, Natalie Sebanz, Corrado Sinigaglia, Sandra Sülzenbrück, Jordan A. Taylor, Michael T. Turvey, Claes von Hofsten, Rebecca A. Williamson
The purpose of the present study was to investigate further the semantic processing impairments of less skilled comprehenders. It tested the hypothesis that this difficulty results from an alteration in the multimodal integration mechanism involved in knowledge emergence as described within multi-trace memory models. To test this assumption, Brunel et al.’s (2010) Experiment 2 was adapted for 27 skilled comprehenders and 32 less skilled comprehenders’ adolescents from the 7 th and the 8 th Grades. The experiment was divided into an integration phase and an experimental phase. During the integration phase, participants had to categorise two geometric shapes, one of which was systematically presented simultaneously with a white noise. To determine whether the white noise has been integrated as a feature of the shape, the experimental phase used a priming paradigm in which the shapes categorised previously were used as primes. The targets were objects that are usually associated with a sound or not. Participants had to categorise the targets’ size. The analysis that was carried out on the correct response times revealed that only skilled comprehenders showed the priming effect observed in adults in Brunel et al.: they were faster to categorise noisy objects when preceded by sound primes than by silent primes. These results suggest that less skilled comprehenders did not integrate the sound with the shape into memory during the integration phase, resulting later in difficulties in the emergence of the trace from memory. These findings are discussed within both embodied and memory-based approaches to reading comprehension.
Whether explicit or implicit, this book starts from the assumption that communication designers must have some understanding about how meanings are made and shared. Over the last few decades new insights have emerged relating to how we construct meanings in cognition. Towards a Cognitivist Understanding of Communication Design explores how these insights might inform design thinking. The first section, Communication, uses theory from the cognitive linguistic enterprise to discuss understandings about the nature of communication that may lie hidden within design practice. Section two, Design, works through stages in a design process, including scoping, ideation, and construal to examine the potential that such theory has to invigorate design practice. The idea that designed objects contain meanings is challenged; instead, designs are seen to provide cues that users must isolate and then integrate to allow meanings to emerge. A process that involves an ongoing embodied engagement with the world. The conceptual framework employed includes, semantic frames, conceptual metaphors, conceptual metonyms, conceptual blends, and so forth, and this is used to analyze a range of different designed artifacts from eminent designers and artists.
A commentary on Calzavarini
(2023), Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2023.2209928
Concepts embody our knowledge of the kinds of things there are in the world. Tying our past experiences to our present interactions with the environment, they enable us to recognize and understand new objects and events. Concepts are also relevant to understanding domains such as social situations, personality types, and even artistic styles. Yet like other phenomenologically simple cognitive processes such as walking or understanding speech, concept formation and use are maddeningly complex.
Research since the 1970s and the decline of the "classical view" of concepts have greatly illuminated the psychology of concepts. But persistent theoretical disputes have sometimes obscured this progress. The Big Book of Concepts goes beyond those disputes to reveal the advances that have been made, focusing on the major empirical discoveries. By reviewing and evaluating research on diverse topics such as category learning, word meaning, conceptual development in infants and children, and the basic level of categorization, the book develops a much broader range of criteria than is usual for evaluating theories of concepts.
Bradford Books imprint
The processes required for object naming were addressed in a study of patients with semantic dementia (a selective decline of semantic memory resulting from progressive temporal lobe atrophy) and in a computational model of single-word production. Although all patients with semantic dementia are impaired in both single-word production and comprehension, previous reports had indicated two different patterns: (a) a parallel decline in accuracy of naming and comprehension, with frequent semantic naming errors, suggesting a purely semantic basis for the anomia and (b) a dramatic progressive anomia without commensurate decline in comprehension, which might suggest a mainly postsemantic source of the anomia. Longitudinal data for 16 patients with semantic dementia reflected these two profiles, but with the following additional important specifications: (1) despite a few relatively extreme versions of one or other profile, the full set of cases formed a continuum in the extent of anomia for a given degree of degraded comprehension; (2) the degree of disparity between these two abilities was associated with relative asymmetry in laterality of atrophy: a parallel decline in the two measures characterized patients with greater right-than left-temporal atrophy, while disproportionate anomia occurred with a predominance of atrophy in the left-temporal lobe. In an implemented computational model of naming, semantic representations were distributed across simulated left-and right-temporal regions, but the semantic units on the left were more strongly connected to left-lateralized phonolo-gical representations. Asymmetric damage to semantic units reproduced the longitudinal patient profiles of naming relative to comprehension, plus additional characteristics of the patients' naming performance. On the basis of both the neuropsychological and computational evidence, we propose that semantic impairment alone can account for the full range of word production deficits described here. &
A key function of the primate brain is recognition of objects from their visual images. The recognition process is flexible, tolerating marked changes in images due to changes in illumination, viewing angle, and pose of the object. Moreover, the primate visual system processes images of novel objects based on previous visual experience of similar objects. Generalization may be an intrinsic property of the primate visual system. In this review the neural organization essential for these flexible aspects of visual object recognition in TE of the inferotemporal cortex is discussed.
Both clinical reports and systematic neuropsychological studies have shown that patients with damage to selected brain sites develop defects in the retrieval of conceptual knowledge for various concrete entities, leading to the hypothesis that the retrieval of knowledge for entities from different conceptual categories depends on partially segregated large-scale neural systems. To test this hypothesis, 116 subjects with focal, unilateral lesions to various sectors of the telencephalon, and 55 matched controls, were studied with a procedure which required the visual recognition of entities from three categories--unique persons, non-unique animals and non-unique tools. Defective recognition of persons was associated with maximal lesion overlap in right temporal polar region; defective recognition of animals was associated with maximal lesion overlap in right mesial occipital/ventral temporal region and also in left mesial occipital region; and defective recognition of tools was associated with maximal lesion overlap in the occipital-temporal-parietal junction of the left hemisphere. The findings support the hypothesis that the normal retrieval of knowledge for concrete entities from different conceptual domains depends on partially segregated neural systems. These sites may operate as catalysts for the retrieval of the multidimensional aspects of knowledge which are necessary and sufficient for the mental representation of a concept of a given entity.
