Metaphor has a double life. It can be described as a directional process in which a stable, familiar base domain provides inferential structure to a less clearly specified target. But metaphor is also described as a process of finding commonalities, an inherently symmetric process. In this second view, both concepts may be altered by the metaphorical comparison. Whereas most theories of metaphor capture one of these aspects, we offer a model based on structure-mapping that captures both sides of metaphor processing. (...) This predicts (a) an initial processing stage of symmetric alignment; and (b) a later directional phase in which inferences are projected to the target. To test these claims, we collected comprehensibility judgments for forward (e.g., “A rumor is a virus”) and reversed (“A virus is a rumor”) metaphors at early and late stages of processing, using a deadline procedure. We found an advantage for the forward direction late in processing, but no directional preference early in processing. Implications for metaphor theory are discussed. (shrink)

Humans can understand thousands of abstract words, even when they do not have clearly perceivable referents. Recent views highlight an important role of social experience in grounding of abstract concepts and sub-kinds of abstract concepts, but empirical work in this area is still in its early stages. In the present study, a picture-word semantic priming paradigm was employed to investigate the contribution effect of social experience that is provided by real-life pictures to social abstract concepts and emotional abstract concepts. Using (...) a lexical decision task, we examined responses to picture-SA word pairs and picture-EA word pairs in social/emotional semantically related and unrelated conditions. All pairs shared either positive or negative valence. The results showed quicker responses to positive SA and EA words that were preceded by related vs. unrelated prime pictures. Specifically, positive SA words were facilitated by the corresponding social scene pictures, whereas positive EA words were facilitated by pictures depict the corresponding facial expressions and gestures. However, such facilitatory effect was not observed in negative picture-SA/EA word conditions. This pattern of results suggests that a facilitatory effect of social experience on abstract concepts varies with different sub-kinds of abstract concepts, that seems to be limited to positive SA concepts. Overall, our findings confirm the crucial role of social experience for abstract concepts and further suggest that not all abstract concepts can benefit from social experience, at least in the semantic priming. (shrink)

The ability of bilingual individuals to manage two competing languages is assumed to rely on both domain-specific language control and domain-general control mechanisms. However, previous studies have reported mixed findings about the extent and nature of cross-domain generality. The present study examined the role of language dominance, along with bilingual language experience, in the relationship between word recognition and domain-general cognitive control. Two single-language lexical decision tasks and a domain-general flanker task were administered to bilinguals who live in the sociolinguistic (...) context of a minority and a majority language, namely, Uyghur and Chinese, respectively. The results showed a diversity in language dominance patterns with better performance in L2 than L1 in the recognition modality, even for participants who self-identified as globally being dominant in L1. This finding reflected all bilinguals’ self-evaluation that their preferred language for reading was L2, suggesting that language dominance is dynamic, depending on what language modality is measured. Furthermore, it was found that an earlier onset age of L2 acquisition and a higher across-modality dominance in L2 were related to faster L2 word recognition. When self-reported language dominance was operationalised as a grouping variable, it was further found that both across-modality L1- and L2-dominant bilingual participants demonstrated a significant relationship between L2 word recognition and domain-general monitoring control, while only L1-dominant bilinguals additionally tapped into inhibitory control, indexed by the flanker effect during L2 word recognition. These findings suggest that language dominance has an impact on the extent and nature of the overlap in control mechanisms across specific linguistic and domain-general cognitive domains and add evidence to a domain-general monitoring account of bilingual word recognition. (shrink)

Rule violations have usually been studied from a third-person perspective, identifying situational factors that render violations more or less likely. A first-person perspective of the agent that actively violates the rules, on the other hand, is only just beginning to emerge. Here we show that committing a rule violation sensitises towards subsequent negative stimuli as well as subsequent authority-related stimuli. In a Prime-Probe design, we used an instructed rule-violation task as the Prime and a word categorisation task as the Probe. (...) Also, we employed a control condition that used a rule inversion task as the Prime. Probe targets were categorised faster after a violation relative to after a rule-based response if they related to either, negative valence or authority. Inversions, however, primed only negative stimuli and did not accelerate the categorisation of authority-related stimuli. A heightened sensitivity towards authority-related targets thus seems to be specific to rule violations. A control experiment showed that these effects cannot be explained in terms of semantic priming. Therefore, we propose that rule violations necessarily activate authority-related representations that make rule violations qualitatively different from simple rule inversions. (shrink)

Glenberg's account falls short in several respects. Besides requiring clearer explication of basic concepts, his account fails to recognize the autonomous nature of perception. His account of what is remembered, and its description, is too static. His strictures against connectionist modeling might be overcome by combining the notions of psychological space and principled learning in an embodied and situated network.

Investigations of the function of consciousness in human information processing have focused mainly on two questions: (1) where does consciousness enter into the information processing sequence and (2) how does conscious processing differ from preconscious and unconscious processing. Input analysis is thought to be initially "preconscious," "pre-attentive," fast, involuntary, and automatic. This is followed by "conscious," "focal-attentive" analysis which is relatively slow, voluntary, and flexible. It is thought that simple, familiar stimuli can be identified preconsciously, but conscious processing is needed (...) to identify complex, novel stimuli. Conscious processing has also been thought to be necessary for choice, learning and memory, and the organization of complex, novel responses, particularly those requiring planning, reflection, or creativity. (shrink)

This paper replies to the first 36 commentaries on my target article on “Is human information processing conscious?” (Behavioral and Brain Sciences,1991, pp.651-669). The target article focused largely on experimental studies of how consciousness relates to human information processing, tracing their relation from input through to output, while discussion of the implications of the findings both for cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind was relatively brief. The commentaries reversed this emphasis, and so, correspondingly, did the reply. The sequence of topics (...) in the reply roughly follows that of the target article. The discussion begins with a reconsideration of the details of the empirical findings, whether they can be extrapolated to non-laboratory settings, and the extent to which one can rely on their use of subjective reports. This is followed by an in-depth discussion of what is meant by “conscious processing” and of how phenomenal consciousness relates to attentional processing. We then turn to broader philosophical and theoretical issues. I point out some of the reasons why I do not support epiphenomenalism, dualist-interactionism, or reductionism, and elaborate on how first- and third-person views of the mind can be regarded as complementary and mutually irreducible. I suggest how the relation of conscious experiences to their neural correlates can be understood in terms of a dual-aspect theory of information,and how this might be used to resolve some of the paradoxes surrounding the causal interactions of consciousness and brain. I also suggest that, viewed from a first-person perspective, consciousness gives purpose to existence, which allows a different way of viewing its role in evolution. (shrink)

Conceptual knowledge is acquired through recurrent experiences, by extracting statistical regularities at different levels of granularity. At a fine level, patterns of feature co-occurrence are categorized into objects. At a coarser level, patterns of concept co-occurrence are categorized into contexts. We present and test CONCAT, a connectionist model that simultaneously learns to categorize objects and contexts. The model contains two hierarchically organized CALM modules (Murre, Phaf, & Wolters, 1992). The first module, the Object Module, forms object representations based on co-occurrences (...) between features. These representations are used as input for the second module, the Context Module, which categorizes contexts based on object co-occurrences. Feedback connections from the Context Module to the Object Module send activation from the active context to those objects that frequently occur within this context. We demonstrate that context feedback contributes to the successful categorization of objects, especially when bottom-up feature information is degraded or ambiguous. (shrink)

A large literature suggests that the organization of words in semantic memory, reflecting meaningful relations among words and the concepts to which they refer, supports many cognitive processes, including memory encoding and retrieval, word learning, and inferential reasoning. The co‐activation of related items has been proposed as a mechanism by which semantic knowledge influences cognition, and contemporary accounts of semantic knowledge propose that this co‐activation is graded—that it depends on how strongly related the items are in semantic memory. Prior research (...) with adults yielded evidence supporting this prediction; however, there is currently no evidence of graded co‐activation early in development. This study provides the first evidence that in children the co‐activation of related items depends on their relational strength in semantic memory. Participants (N = 84, age range: 3–9 years) were asked to identify a target (e.g., bone) amid distractors. Children's responses were slowed down by the presence of a related distractor (e.g., puppy) relative to unrelated distractors (e.g., flower)—suggesting that children co‐activated related items upon hearing the name of the target. Importantly, the degree of this co‐activation was predicted by the strength of the target–distractor relation, such that distractors more strongly related to the targets slowed down children to a larger extent. These findings have important implications for understanding how organized semantic knowledge affects other cognitive processes across development. (shrink)

A naturalistic scheme of primitive conceptual representations is proposed using the statistical measure of mutual information. It is argued that a concept represents, not the class of objects that caused its tokening, but the class of objects that is most likely to have caused it (had it been tokened), as specified by the statistical measure of mutual information. This solves the problem of misrepresentation which plagues causal accounts, by taking the representation relation to be determined via ordinal relationships between conditional (...) probabilities. The scheme can deal with statistical biases and does not rely on arbitrary criteria. Implications for the theory of meaning and semantic content are addressed. (shrink)

Central to contemporary cognitive science is the notion that mental processes involve computations defined over internal representations. This view stands in sharp contrast to the to visual perception and cognition, whose most prominent proponent has been J.J. Gibson. In the direct theory, perception does not involve computations of any sort; it is the result of the direct pickup of available information. The publication of Gibson's recent book (Gibson 1979) offers an opportunity to examine his approach, and, more generally, to contrast (...) the theory of direct perception with the computational/representational view. In the first part of the present article (Sections 2direct perceptioncase study”: the problem of perceiving the three-dimensional shape of moving objects is examined. This problem, which has been extensively studied within the immediate perception framework, serves to illustrate some of the inherent shortcomings of that approach. Finally, in Section 5, an attempt is made to place the theory of direct perception in perspective by embedding it in a more comprehensive framework. (shrink)

The DRM paradigm produces robust false memories of non-presented critical words. After studying a thematic word list participants falsely remember the critical item “sleep.” We report two false memory experiments. Study One introduces a novel use of the lexical decision task to prime critical words. Participants see two letter-strings and make timed responses indicating whether they are both words. The word pairs Night-Bed and Dream-Thweeb both prime “sleep” but only one pair contains two words. Our primary purpose is to introduce (...) this new methodology via two pilot experiments. The results, considered preliminary, are promising as they indicate that participants were as likely to recognize critical words and presented words just as when studying thematic lists. Study Two actually employs the standard DRM lists so that semantic priming is in play there as well. The second study, however, uses functional near-infrared spectroscopy to measure activity in the prefrontal cortex during a DRM task which includes a deception phase where participants intentionally lie about critical lures. False and true memories occurred at high levels and activated many of the same brain regions but, compared to true memories, cortical activity was higher for false memories and lies. Accuracy findings are accompanied by confidence and reaction time results. Both investigations suggest that it is difficult to distinguish accurate from inaccurate memories. We explain results in terms of activation-monitoring theory and Fuzzy Trace Theory. We provide real world implications and suggest extending the present research to varying age groups and special populations. A nagging question has not been satisfactorily answered: Could neural pathways exist that signal the presence of false memories and lies? Answering this question will require imaging experiments that focus on regions of distinction such as the anterior prefrontal cortex. (shrink)

Impaired performance in verbal fluency tasks is a frequent observation in Parkinson’s disease. As to the nature of the underlying cognitive deficit, it is commonly attributed to a frontal-type dysexecutive syndrome due to nigrostriatal dopamine depletion. Whereas dopaminergic medication typically improves VF performance in PD, e.g., by ameliorating impaired lexical switching, its effect on semantic network activation is unclear. Data from priming studies suggest that dopamine causes a faster decay of semantic activation spread. The aim of the current study was (...) to examine the impact of dopaminergic medication on the dynamic change of word frequency during VF performance as a measure of semantic spreading activation. To this end, we performed a median split analysis of word frequency during phonemic and semantic VF task performance in a PD group tested while receiving dopaminergic medication as well as after drug withdrawal, and in a sample of age-matched healthy volunteers. Dopaminergic medication in the PD group significantly affected phonemic VF with improved word production as well as increased error-rates. The expected decrease of word frequency during VF task performance was significantly smaller in the PD group ON medication than in healthy volunteers across semantic and phonemic VF. No significant group-difference emerged between controls and the PD group in the OFF condition. The comparison between both treatment conditions within the PD group did not reach statistical significance. The observed pattern of results indicates a faster decay of semantic network activation during lexical access in PD patients on dopaminergic medication. In view of improved word generation, this finding is consistent with a concept of more focused neural activity by an increased signal-to-noise ratio due to dopaminergic neuromodulation. However, the effect of dopaminergic stimulation on VF output suggests a trade-off between these beneficial effects and increased error-rates. (shrink)

It has been proposed that, whilst implicit attitudes, alike beliefs, are propositionally structured, 629–658, 2016), the former respond to evidence and modulate other attitudes in a fragmented manner, and so constitute a sui generis class, the “patchy endorsements”, 800–823, 2015). In the following, I demonstrate that the patchy endorsements theorist is committed to the truth of two claims: no implicit attitude is responsive to content to the same extent as any belief; and there is a significant gap between the most (...) responsive implicit attitude and the least responsive belief. I argue that both and fail to hold. Many implicit attitudes respond to evidence and modulate other attitudes. Meanwhile, at least some ordinary beliefs exhibit lower evidence-responsiveness and inferential efficacy than at least some implicit attitudes, defeating and. A better interpretation is that attitudes may be ordered along a continuum according to their responsiveness to content. At one extreme end, we find attitudes usually identified as implicit, and at the other, attitudes usually identified as beliefs, but in the middle, there is an area of overlap. I consider the consequences of the continuum view for existing folk psychological concepts. (shrink)

An unwanted thought appears to be cued easily by reminders in the environment but often the thought itself seems to cue nothing more than the desire to eliminate it from consciousness. This unusual asymmetry in the way unwanted thoughts are linked to other thoughts was the focus of the present research. Participants who were asked to suppress a thought or to concentrate on it completed a task assessing the influence of priming on reaction time for word/non-word judgments. Results revealed that (...) suppression under cognitive load produced asymmetric priming: Priming with the associate of a suppressed word speeded RT for the suppressed word, but priming with a suppressed word did not speed RT for associated words. These findings suggest that thought suppression induces an unusual form of cognitive accessibility in which movement of activation toward the suppressed thought from associates is facilitated but movement of activation away from the suppressed thought to associates is undermined. (shrink)