TEST is a novel taxonomy of knowledge representations based on three distinct hierarchically organized representational features: Tropism, Embodiment, and Situatedness. Tropic representational features reflect constraints of the physical world on the agent's ability to form, reactivate, and enrich embodied (i.e., resulting from the agent's bodily constraints) conceptual representations embedded in situated contexts. The proposed hierarchy entails that representations can, in principle, have tropic features without necessarily having situated and/or embodied features. On the other hand, representations that are situated and/or embodied (...) are likely to be simultaneously tropic. Hence, although we propose tropism as the most general term, the hierarchical relationship between embodiment and situatedness is more on a par, such that the dominance of one component over the other relies on the distinction between offline storage versus online generation as well as on representation-specific properties. (shrink)

In an evolutionary perspective Louwerse elaborates the Symbol Interdependency Hypothesis (Louwerse, 2011), arguing that language has evolved such that it maps onto the perceptual system, allowing to bootstrap meaning also when grounding is limited. The author concludes that in principle the processing of abstract and concrete words is the same and that in both cases language users tend to rely anyway on indexical relationships that words entertain with other words.

The American psychoanalyst and developmental psychologist Daniel Stern’s idea of vitality forms might suggest a new solution to explain how other minds are intensely expressed in their actions. Vitality forms characterize the expressive style of actions. The effective perception of vitality forms allows people to recognize the affective states and intentions of others in their actions, and could even open the possibility of properties of objects that are indicated by the given actions. Currently, neurophysiological studies present that there might be (...) a neural mirror mechanism in the dorso-central insula, middle cingulate cortex, and other related cerebral areas, which serve to preferably perceive and deliver vitality forms of actions. In this article, possible types of vitality forms related to other minds, which have been brought to particular attention in recent years, have been collected and discussed in the following four areas: Vitality forms on understanding non-verbal intention, on understanding verbal intention, vitality forms as grounding social cognition, and as grounding social emotion. These four areas, however, might refer to an entirety of a binary actor-observer communicative landscape. In this review, we try to simplify the analysis by relying on two fundamental dimensions of criteria: first, the idea of vitality forms is conceived as the most basic way of observing subsequent higher-order dimensions of action, that is, understanding intention in the style of action. Thus, in the first two subsections, the relationships between vitality forms and their roles in understanding non-verbal and verbal intention have been discussed. Second, vitality forms could also be conceived as background conditions of all the other mental categories, that is, vitality forms can ground cognition and emotion in a social context. In the second dimension, the existence of social cognition or emotion depends on the existence of the stylistic kinematics of action. A grounding relation is used to distinguish a ground, that is, vitality forms, and its grounded mental categories. As relating with the domain of social perception, in this review, it has been discussed vitality forms possibly could ground social cognition and social emotion, respectively. (shrink)

Introduction: The effect of promoting a physical reaction by the described action is called the action-sentence compatibility effect. It has been verified that physical motion changes depending on the time phase and grammatical expression. However, it is unclear how adverbs and onomatopoeia change motion simulations and subsequent movements.Methods: The subjects were 35 healthy adults. We prepared 20 sentences each, expressing actions related to hands and feet. These were converted into 80 sentences, with the words “Slow” or “Quick” added to the (...) words related to the speed of movement, and 80 sentences with the words “Fast” and onomatopoeia “Satto” added. Additionally, 20 unnatural sentences were prepared for each stimulus set as pseudo sentences. Choice reaction time was adopted; subjects pressed the button with their right hand only when the presented text was correctly understood. The reaction time and the number of errors were recorded and compared.Results: As a result of a two-way repeated ANOVA, an interaction effect was observed in RTs and NoE in set A. “Hand and Fast” had significantly faster RTs than “Hand and Slow” and “Foot and Fast.” Furthermore, “Hand and Fast” had a significantly higher NoE than others. In set B, the main effects were observed in both RTs and NoE. “Hand” and “Satto” had significantly faster RTs than “Foot” and “Quick,” respectively. Additionally, an interaction effect was observed in NoE, wherein “Foot and Satto” was significantly higher than “Hand and Satto” and “Foot and Quick.”Conclusion: In this study, the word “Fast” promoted hand response, reaffirming ACE. The onomatopoeia “Satto” was a word that conveys the speed of movement, but it was suggested that the degree of understanding may be influenced by the body part and the attributes of the subject. (shrink)

Recent investigations on how people derive meaning from language have focused on task‐dependent shifts between two cognitive systems. The symbolic (amodal) system represents meaning as the statistical relationships between words. The embodied (modal) system represents meaning through neurocognitive simulation of perceptual or sensorimotor systems associated with a word's referent. A primary finding of literature in this field is that the embodied system is only dominant when a task necessitates it, but in certain paradigms, this has only been demonstrated using nouns (...) and adjectives. The purpose of this paper is to study whether similar effects hold with verbs. Experiment 1 evaluated a novel task in which participants rated a selection of verbs on their implied vertical movement. Ratings correlated well with distributional semantic models, establishing convergent validity, though some variance was unexplained by language statistics alone. Experiment 2 replicated previous noun‐based location‐cue congruency experimental paradigms with verbs and showed that the ratings obtained in Experiment 1 predicted reaction times more strongly than language statistics. Experiment 3 modified the location‐cue paradigm by adding movement to create an animated, temporally decoupled, movement‐verb judgment task designed to examine the relative influence of symbolic and embodied processing for verbs. Results were generally consistent with linguistic shortcut hypotheses of symbolic‐embodied integrated language processing; location‐cue congruence elicited processing facilitation in some conditions, and perceptual information accounted for reaction times and accuracy better than language statistics alone. These studies demonstrate novel ways in which embodied and linguistic information can be examined while using verbs as stimuli. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of the strategic control involved in skilled action. When I discuss strategic control, I have in mind the practical goals, plans, and strategies that skilled agents use in order to specify, structure, and organize their skilled actions, which they have learned through practice. The idea is that skilled agents are better than novices not only at implementing the intentions that they have but also at forming the right intentions. More specifically, skilled agents are able formulate (...) and modify, adjust and adapt their practical intentions in ways that are appropriate, effective, and flexible given their overall goals. Further, to specify the kind of action plans that are involved in strategic control, I’ll rely on empirical evidence concerning mental practice and mental imagery from sports psychology as well as evidence highlighting the systematic differences in the cognitive representations of skills between experts and non-experts. I’ll claim that, together, this evidence suggests that the intentions that structure skilled actions are practical and not theoretical, that is, that they are perceptual and motor and not abstract, amodal, or linguistic. Importantly, despite their grounded nature, these plans are still personal-level, deliberate, rational states. That is, the practical intentions used to specify and structure skilled actions are best conceived of as higher-order, motor-modal structures, which can be manipulated and used by the agent for the purpose of reasoning, deliberation, decision-making and, of course, the actual online structuring and organizing of action. (shrink)

Recent experiments have shown that when individuals with a substance use disorder are confronted with drug-related cues, they exhibit an automatically activated tendency to approach these cues. The strength of the drug approach bias has been associated with clinically relevant measures, such as increased drug craving and relapse, and activations in brain reward areas. Retraining the approach bias by means of cognitive bias modification has been demonstrated to decrease relapse rates in patients with an alcohol use disorder and to reduce (...) alcohol cue-evoked limbic activity. Here, we review empirical and theoretical literature on the drug approach bias and explore two distinct models of how the drug approach bias may be embodied. First, we consider the “biological meaning” hypothesis, which grounds the automatic approach bias in the natural meaning of the body. Second, we consider the “sensorimotor hypothesis,” which appeals to the specific sensorimotor loops involved in the instantiation of addictive behaviors as the basis of the automatic approach bias. In order to differentiate between the adequacies of these competing explanations, we present specific, predictions that each model should make. (shrink)

The Phenomenal Self (PS) is widely considered to be dependent on body representations, whereas the Narrative Self (NS) is generally thought to rely on abstract cognitive representations. The concept of the Bodily Social Self (BSS) might play an important role in explaining how the high level cognitive self-representations enabling the NS might emerge from the bodily basis of the PS. First, the phenomenal self (PS) and narrative self (NS), are briefly examined. Next, the BSS is defined and its potential for (...) explaining aspects of social cognition is explored. The minimal requirements for a BSS are considered, before reviewing empirical evidence regarding the development of the BSS over the first year of life. Finally, evidence on the involvement of the body in social distinctions between self and other is reviewed to illustrate how the BSS is affected by both the bottom up effects of multisensory stimulation and the top down effects of social identification. (shrink)

Contemporary semantic theories can be classified along two dimensions: (i) the way and time-course in which contextual factors influence sentence truth-conditions; and (ii) whether and to what extent comprehension involves sensory, motor and emotional processes. In order to explore this theoretical space, our ERP study investigates the time-course of the interaction between the lexically specified telic component of a noun (the function of the object to which the noun refers to, e.g., a funnel is generally used to pour liquids into (...) containers) and an ad-hoc affordance contextually induced by the situation described in the discourse. We found that, if preceded by a neutral discourse context, a verb incongruent with the noun’s telic component as in “She uses the funnel to hang her coat” elicited an enhanced N400 compared to a congruent verb as in “She uses the funnel to pour water into a container”. However, if the situation introduced in the preceding discourse induced a new function for the object as an ad-hoc affordance (e.g., the funnel is glued to the wall and the agent wants to hang the coat), we observed a crossing-over regarding the direction of the N400 effect: comparing the ad-hoc affordance-inducing context with the neutral context, the N400 for the incongruent verb was significantly reduced, whereas the N400 for the congruent verb was significantly enhanced. We explain these results as a consequence of the incorporation of the contextually triggered ad-hoc affordance into the meaning of the noun. Combining these results with an analysis of semantic similarity values between test sentences and contexts, we argue that one possibility is that the incorporation of an ad-hoc affordance may be explained on the basis of the mental simulation of concurrent motor information. (shrink)

The Defining Issues Test 2 (DIT-2) and Engineering Ethical Reasoning Instrument (EERI) are designed to measure ethical reasoning of general (DIT-2) and engineering-student (EERI) populations. These tools—and the DIT-2 especially—have gained wide usage for assessing the ethical reasoning of undergraduate students. This paper reports on a research study in which the ethical reasoning of first-year undergraduate engineering students at multiple universities was assessed with both of these tools. In addition to these two instruments, students were also asked to create personal (...) concept maps of the phrase “ethical decision-making.” It was hypothesized that students whose instrument scores reflected more postconventional levels of moral development and more sophisticated ethical reasoning skills would likewise have richer, more detailed concept maps of ethical decision-making, reflecting their deeper levels of understanding of this topic and the complex of related concepts. In fact, there was no significant correlation between the instrument scores and concept map scoring, suggesting that the way first-year students _conceptualize_ ethical decision making does not predict the way they behave when _performing_ scenario-based ethical reasoning (perhaps more situated). This disparity indicates a need to more precisely quantify engineering ethical reasoning and decision making, if we wish to inform assessment outcomes using the results of such quantitative analyses. (shrink)

Summary The paper presents the result of a collective reflection inspired by the individual suggestions of 30 researchers working in different research areas. They are all familiar with the Experimental Phenomenology of Perception, and are aware of the importance that this approach might represent nowadays in their specific research field. The picture that emerges from this ‘mosaic’ stimulates us to consider the potential future developments of this approach if we accept that we need to push its borders beyond the traditional (...) aims of the study of perception (as masterfully developed by the historic Italian Maestri of this approach). If we take this broader view, the Experimental Phenomenology of Perception can extend its perimeters from an analysis of strictly perceptual aspects to an analysis of cognitive and metacognitive aspects (such as aesthetic evaluations, the perception of risk, the experience of certainty/uncertainty in a reasoning process, the perception of proximity to/distance from the solution to a problem and meaning-making in language). The cognitive and metacognitive aspects referred to are grounded in and modelled on the perceiver’s experience of a given situation. (shrink)

Conventional behaviors develop from practice for regularly occurring problems of coordination within a community of actors. Reusing and extending conventional methods for coordinating behavior is the task of everyday reasoning.The computational model presented in the paper details the emergence of convention in circumstances where there is no ruling body of knowledge developed by prior generations of actors within the community to guide behavior. The framework we assume combines social theories of cognition with human information processing models that have been developed (...) within Cognitive Science. The model presented reflects both elements of the framework. Conventional behaviors are partially coded in the predisposition of participants in a joint activity to expect certain points of coordination to develop during the course of the activity. The expected points of coordination that are commonly assumed form a design for an activity. Because of uncertainty, interruptions, and numerous other opportunities to get off‐track and out‐of‐synch, the participants must work jointly and continuously to achieve conventional coordination.One feature of the model is that the community improves its performance despite the fact that individual actors reason independently about their experiences. Another important feature of the model is that the mechanisms for improving behavior are tied to the memory function of individual actors. A third important feature is that the social interaction among the participants simplifies and drives the everyday reasoning processes. An analysis of a large set of computational experiments supports the theoretical position that is developed regarding everyday reasoning and convention. (shrink)