The aim of this paper is to argue that the phenomenal similarity between perceiving and visualizing can be explained by the similarity between the structure of the content of these two different mental states. And this puts important constraints on how we should think about perceptual content and the content of mental imagery.

The way we refer to things in the world is shaped by the immediate physical context as well as the discourse history. But what part of the discourse history is relevant to language use in the present? In four experiments, we combine the study of task‐based conversation with measures of recognition memory to examine the role of physical contextual cues that shape what speakers perceive to be a part of the relevant discourse history. Our studies leverage the differentiation effect, a (...) phenomenon in which speakers are more likely to use a modified expression to refer to an object (e.g., dotted sock) if they had previously described a similar object (e.g., striped sock) than when they had not described a similar object. Two physical cues—the background that framed the to‐be‐described pictures and the position of the pictures in the display—were manipulated to alter perceptions about the relevant discourse context. We measured the rate with which speakers modify referring expressions to differentiate current from past referents. Recognition memory measures following the conversation probed what was and was not remembered about past discourse referents and contexts. Analysis of modification rates indicated that these contextual grouping cues shaped perceptions about the relevant discourse context. The contextual cues did not affect memory for the referents, but the memory for past referents was better for speakers than for listeners. Our findings show that perceptions about the relevant discourse history are a key determinant of how language is used in the moment but also that conversational partners form asymmetric representations of the discourse history. (shrink)

People often make use of a spatial “mental time line” to represent events in time. We investigated whether the eyes follow such a mental time line during online language comprehension of sentences that refer to the past, present, and future. Participants' eye movements were measured on a blank screen while they listened to these sentences. Saccade direction revealed that the future is mapped higher up in space than the past. Moreover, fewer saccades were made when two events are simultaneously taking (...) place at the present moment compared to two events that are happening in different points in time. This is the first evidence that oculomotor correlates reflect mental looking along an abstract invisible time line during online language comprehension about time. Our results support the idea that observing eye movements is likely to “detect” invisible spatial scaffoldings which are involved in cognitively processing abstract meaning, even when the abstract meaning lacks an explicit spatial correlate. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

This paper outlines a first attempt to model the special constraints that arise in language processing in conversation, and to explore the implications such functional considerations may have on language typology and language change. In particular, we focus on processing pressures imposed by conversational turn-taking and their consequences for the cultural evolution of the structural properties of language. We present an agent-based model of cultural evolution where agents take turns at talk in conversation. When the start of planning for the (...) next turn is constrained by the position of the verb, the stable distribution of dominant word orders across languages evolves to match the actual distribution reasonably well. We suggest that the interface of cognition and interaction should be a more central part of the story of language evolution. (shrink)

Conversation is supported by the beliefs that people have in common and the perceptual experience that they share. The visual context of a conversation has two aspects: the information that is available to each conversant, and their beliefs about what is present for each other. In our experiment, we separated these factors for the first time and examined their impact on a spontaneous conversation. We manipulated the fact that a visual scene was shared or not and the belief that a (...) visual scene was shared or not. Participants watched videos of actors talking about a controversial topic, then discussed their own views while looking at either a blank screen or the actors. Each believed (correctly or not) that their partner was either looking at a blank screen or the same images. We recorded conversants’ eye movements, quantified how they were coordinated, and analyzed their speech patterns. Gaze coordination has been shown to be causally related to the knowledge people share before a conversation, and the information they later recall. Here, we found that both the presence of the visual scene, and beliefs about its presence for another, influenced language use and gaze coordination. (shrink)

The Abstract Conceptual Feature (ACF) framework predicts that word meaning is represented within a high‐dimensional semantic space bounded by weighted contributions of perceptual, affective, and encyclopedic information. The ACF, like latent semantic analysis, is amenable to distance metrics between any two words. We applied predictions of the ACF framework to abstract words using eyetracking via an adaptation of the classical “visual word paradigm” (VWP). Healthy adults (n = 20) selected the lexical item most related to a probe word in a (...) 4‐item written word array comprising the target and three distractors. The relation between the probe and each of the four words was determined using the semantic distance metrics derived from ACF ratings. Eye movement data indicated that the word that was most semantically related to the probe received more and longer fixations relative to distractors. Importantly, in sets where participants did not provide an overt behavioral response, the fixation rates were nonetheless significantly higher for targets than distractors, closely resembling trials where an expected response was given. Furthermore, ACF ratings which are based on individual words predicted eye fixation metrics of probe‐target similarity at least as well as latent semantic analysis ratings which are based on word co‐occurrence. The results provide further validation of Euclidean distance metrics derived from ACF ratings as a measure of one facet of the semantic relatedness of abstract words and suggest that they represent a reasonable approximation of the organization of abstract conceptual space. The data are also compatible with the broad notion that multiple sources of information (not restricted to sensorimotor and emotion information) shape the organization of abstract concepts. While the adapted “VWP” is potentially a more metacognitive task than the classical visual world paradigm, we argue that it offers potential utility for studying abstract word comprehension. (shrink)

In the last six or seven years, aphantasia has received attention from media outlets, television shows, and social networks. This alleged condition, however, has hardly been discussed in the philosophy of mind. In this paper, I assess some of the research conducted in cognitive science and provide, for the first time in the literature, a comprehensive assessment of possible explanations for aphantasia. Specifically, the hypotheses I submit for consideration ascribe the reports of absence of visual imagery to (i) a discrepancy (...) at the level of concepts, (ii) a failure of attentional mechanisms that modulate introspection, (iii) a lack of personal-level access to sub-personal imagistic representations, and (iv) an absence of sub-personal imagistic representations. I conclude that hypotheses (i) and (ii) can be rejected while hypotheses (iii) and (iv) can be accepted as defensible candidates for explaining aphantasia, although the latter is better suited to account for the available evidence in both comparative and absolute terms. Finally, I present some educated guesses and empirical research that could shed further light on the study of this condition. (shrink)

Previous research showed that sensorimotor information affects the perception of properties associated with implied perceptual context during language comprehension. Three experiments addressed a novel question of whether perceptual context may contribute to a simulation of information about such out‐of‐sight objects as cast shadows. In Experiment 1, participants read a sentence that implied a particular shadow cast on a target (blinds vs. an open window) and then verified the picture of the object onto which a shadow was cast. Responses were faster (...) when the shadow of blinds cast on the object matched that implied by the sentence. However, the data did not show the same matching effect for pictures with cast shadows from an open window. In Experiments 2 and 3, we found that verification times for pictures with no cast shadows were faster when preceded by an “open window” sentence, thus suggesting that reading the sentence does not elicit a visual simulation of any specific shadow. Experiment 3 showed that the objects superimposed with a cast shadow of the blinds and blinds themselves were verified faster after reading a “blinds” sentence. However, the results of an order analysis showed the temporal stability of the “blinds shadows” effect, but the disappearance of the “blinds” effect in the second half of the data. We conclude that the results are compatible, to a lesser or greater extent, with multiple accounts, and discuss our findings in the context of a mental imagery view, a mental simulation view, and an amodal representation view. (shrink)

Traditionally, the “Imagery Debate” has opposed two main camps: depictivism and descriptivism. This debate has essentially focused on the nature of the internal representations thought to be involved in imagery, without addressing at all the question of action. More recently, a third, “embodied” view is moving the debate into a new phase. The embodied approach focuses on the interdependence of perception, cognition and action, and in its more radical line this approach promotes the idea that perception is not a process (...) involving internal world-models. The anti-representationalist version of the embodied paradigm covers, among others that we shall not discuss here, two quite different positions, namely the enactive approach and sensorimotor theory. Up to now these two anti-representationalist accounts have generally been confounded. In this paper we will argue that despite some important commonalities, enactive and sensorimotor accounts come with distinctive theoretical traits with regard to their approach to imagery. These become manifest when critically examining the role they assign to sensorimotor engagements with the world. We shall argue that enactive and sensorimotor approaches are different in their understanding of the role of embodied action, and these different notions of embodiment lead to different explanatory accounts of perception and imagery. We propose that, due to existing ambiguities in enactivism, the sensorimotor theory is a better framework for a skill-based approach to imagery. (shrink)

Language is more than a source of information for accessing higher-order conceptual knowledge. Indeed, language may determine how people perceive and interpret visual stimuli. Visual processing in linguistic contexts, for instance, mirrors language processing and happens incrementally, rather than through variously-oriented fixations over a particular scene. The consequences of this atypical visual processing are yet to be determined. Here, we investigated the integration of visual and linguistic input during a reasoning task. Participants listened to sentences containing conjunctions or disjunctions and (...) looked at visual scenes containing two pictures that either matched or mismatched the nouns. Degree of match between nouns and pictures and between their expected and actual spatial positions affected fixations as well as judgments. We conclude that language induces incremental processing of visual scenes, which in turn becomes susceptible to reasoning errors during the language-meaning verification process. (shrink)

The human sentence processor is able to make rapid predictions about upcoming linguistic input. For example, upon hearing the verb eat, anticipatory eye-movements are launched toward edible objects in a visual scene. However, the cognitive mechanisms that underlie anticipation remain to be elucidated in ecologically valid contexts. Previous research has, in fact, mainly used clip-art scenes and object arrays, raising the possibility that anticipatory eye-movements are limited to displays containing a small number of objects in a visually impoverished context. In (...) Experiment 1, we confirm that anticipation effects occur in real-world scenes and investigate the mechanisms that underlie such anticipation. In particular, we demonstrate that real-world scenes provide contextual information that anticipation can draw on: When the target object is not present in the scene, participants infer and fixate regions that are contextually appropriate. Experiment 2 investigates whether such contextual inference requires the co-presence of the scene, or whether memory representations can be utilized instead. The same real-world scenes as in Experiment 1 are presented to participants, but the scene disappears before the sentence is heard. We find that anticipation occurs even when the screen is blank, including when contextual inference is required. We conclude that anticipatory language processing is able to draw upon global scene representations to make contextual inferences. These findings are compatible with theories assuming contextual guidance, but posit a challenge for theories assuming object-based visual indices. (shrink)

Memory is fleeting. New material rapidly obliterates previous material. How, then, can the brain deal successfully with the continual deluge of linguistic input? We argue that, to deal with this “Now-or-Never” bottleneck, the brain must compress and recode linguistic input as rapidly as possible. This observation has strong implications for the nature of language processing: (1) the language system must “eagerly” recode and compress linguistic input; (2) as the bottleneck recurs at each new representational level, the language system must build (...) a multilevel linguistic representation; and (3) the language system must deploy all available information predictively to ensure that local linguistic ambiguities are dealt with “Right-First-Time”; once the original input is lost, there is no way for the language system to recover. This is “Chunk-and-Pass” processing. Similarly, language learning must also occur in the here and now, which implies that language acquisition is learning to process, rather than inducing, a grammar. Moreover, this perspective provides a cognitive foundation for grammaticalization and other aspects of language change. Chunk-and-Pass processing also helps explain a variety of core properties of language, including its multilevel representational structure and duality of patterning. This approach promises to create a direct relationship between psycholinguistics and linguistic theory. More generally, we outline a framework within which to integrate often disconnected inquiries into language processing, language acquisition, and language change and evolution. (shrink)

An eye-tracking while listening study based on the blank screen paradigm was conducted to investigate the processing of literal and metaphorical verbs of motion. The study was based on two assumpti...

Previous research has shown that language comprehenders resolve reference quickly and incrementally, but not much is known about the neural processes and representations that are involved. Studies of visual short-term memory suggest that access to the representation of an item from a previously seen display is associated with a negative evoked potential at posterior electrodes contralateral to the spatial location of that item in the display. In this paper we demonstrate that resolving the reference of a noun phrase in a (...) recently seen visual display is associated with an event-related potential that is analogous to this effect. Our design was adapted from the visual world paradigm: in each trial, participants saw a display containing three simple objects, followed by a question about the objects, such as Was the pink fish next to a boat?, presented word by word. Questions differed in whether the color adjective allowed the reader to identify the referent of the noun phrase or not (i.e., whether one or more objects of the named color were present). Consistent with our hypothesis, we observed that reference resolution by the adjective was associated with a negative evoked potential at posterior electrodes contralateral to spatial location of the referent, starting approximately 333 ms after the onset of the adjective. The fact that the laterality of the effect depended upon the location of the referent within the display suggests that reference resolution in visual domains involves, at some level, a modality-specific representation. In addition, the effect gives us an estimate of the time course of processing from perception of the written word to the point at which its meaning is brought into correspondence with the referential domain. (shrink)

We identify a number of principles with respect to prediction that, we argue, underpin adult language comprehension: (a) comprehension consists in realizing a mapping between the unfolding sentence and the event representation corresponding to the real‐world event being described; (b) the realization of this mapping manifests as the ability to predict both how the language will unfold, and how the real‐world event would unfold if it were being experienced directly; (c) concurrent linguistic and nonlinguistic inputs, and the prior internal states (...) of the system, each drive the predictive process; (d) the representation of prior internal states across a representational substrate common to the linguistic and nonlinguistic domains enables the predictive process to operate over variable time frames and variable levels of representational abstraction. We review empirical data exemplifying the operation of these principles and discuss the relationship between prediction, event structure, thematic role assignment, and incrementality. (shrink)

This thesis investigates the relationship between eye movements, mental imagery and memory retrieval in four studies based on eye-tracking experiments. The first study is an investigation of eye movements during mental imagery elicited both visually and verbally. The use of complex stimuli and the development of a novel method where eye movements are recorded concurrently with verbal data enabled the above-mentioned relationship to be studied to an extent going beyond what previous research had been able to do. Eye movements were (...) found to closely reflect content and spatial layout while participants were listening to a spoken scene description, while they were describing the same scene from memory, and while they were describing a picture they had previously seen. This effect was equally strong during recall from memory irrespective of whether the scene visualised had originally been inspected visually by the participants or whether it was constructed whole-cloth from long-term memory. It was also found that eye movements "to nothing" appeared both when the participants were visualising scenes while looking at a blank screen and when they were doing so in complete darkness. The second study explored an effect frequently observed in the first study, involving a "scaling-down" during recall of participants' gaze patterns to an area smaller than that occupied by the stimulus encoded. It was found that this scaling effect correlated with spatial-imagery ability: the gaze patterns of participants with weaker spatial-imagery ability were closer in size to the encoded scene than the gaze patterns of those stronger in spatial-imagery ability. In the third study, the role of eye movements during mental imagery was investigated in four experiments where eye movements were prohibited during either the encoding phase or the recall phase. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that maintaining central fixation during visual or auditory encoding, respectively, had no effect on how eye movements were executed during recall. Thus, oculomotor events during recall are not reproductions of those produced during encoding. In Experiments 3 and 4, central fixation was instead maintained during recall. This turned out to alter and impair scene recollection, irrespective of the modality of encoding. Finally, in the fourth study, the functional role of eye movements in relation to memory retrieval was further investigated by means of direct eye-movement manipulation in the retrieval phase of an episodic-memory task. Four conditions were used: free viewing on a blank screen, maintaining central fixation, viewing within a square congruent with the location of the objects to be recalled, and viewing within a square incongruent with the location of the objects to be recalled. The results obtained show that gaze position plays an active and facilitatory role during memory retrieval. The findings from these studies are discussed in the light of current theories regarding eye movements during mental imagery and memory retrieval. (shrink)