Findings in the social psychology literatures on attitudes, social perception, and emotion demonstrate that social information processing involves embodiment, where embodiment refers both to actual bodily states and to simulations of experience in the brain’s modality-specific systems for perception, action, and introspection. We show that embodiment underlies social information processing when the perceiver interacts with actual social objects (online cognition) and when the perceiver represents social objects in their absence (offline cognition). Although many empirical demonstrations of social embodiment exist, no particularly compelling account of them has been offered. We propose that theories of embodied cognition, such as the Perceptual Symbol Systems (PSS) account (Barsalou, 1999), explain and integrate these findings, and that they also suggest exciting new directions for research. We compare the PSS account to a variety of related proposals and show how it addresses criticisms that have previously posed problems for the general embodiment approach. Consider the following findings. Wells and Petty (1980) reported that nodding the head (as in agreement)

1.1. Conceptual systems 621 1.2. Semantic memory 621

Various lines of research on language have converged on the premise that linguistic knowledge has as its basic unit pairings of form and meaning. The precise nature of the meanings involved, however, remains subject to the longstanding debate between proponents of arbitrary, abstract representations and those who argue for more detailed perceptuo-motor representations. We propose a model, Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG), which integrates these two positions by casting meanings as schematic representations embodied in human perceptual and motor systems. On this view, understanding everyday language entails running mental simulations of its perceptual and motor content. Linguistic meanings are parameterizations of aspects of such simulations; they thus serve as an interface between the relatively discrete properties of language and the detailed and encyclopedic knowledge needed for simulation. This paper assembles evidence from neural imaging and psycholinguistic experiments supporting this general approach to language understanding. It also introduces ECG as a model that fulfills the requisite constraints, and presents two kinds of support for the model. First, we describe two verbal matching studies that test predictions the model makes about the degree of motor detail available in lexical representations. Second, we demonstrate the viability and utility of ECG as a grammar formalism through its capacity to support computational models of language understanding and acquisition.

Observing actions and understanding sentences about actions activates corresponding motor processes in the observer–comprehender. In 5 experiments, the authors addressed 2 novel questions regarding language-based motor resonance. The 1st question asks whether visual motion that is associated with an action produces motor resonance in sentence comprehension. The 2nd question asks whether motor resonance is modulated during sentence comprehension. The authors ’ experiments provide an affirmative response to both questions. A rotating visual stimulus affects both actual manual rotation and the comprehension of manual rotation sentences. Motor resonance is modulated by the linguistic input and is a rather immediate and localized phenomenon. The results are discussed in the context of theories of action observation and mental simulation.

According to the Perceptual Symbols Theory of cognition (Barsalou, 1999), modality-specific simulations underlie the representation of concepts. A strong prediction of this view is that perceptual processing affects conceptual processing. In this study, participants performed a perceptual detection task and a conceptual property-verification task in alternation. Responses on the property-verification task were slower for those trials that were preceded by a perceptual trial in a different modality than for those that were preceded by a perceptual trial in the same modality. This finding of a modality-switch effect across perceptual processing and conceptual processing supports the hypothesis that perceptual and conceptual representations are partially based on the same systems.

Information visualization is a powerful method for understanding and working with data. However, we still have an incomplete understanding of how people use visualization to think about information. We propose that people use visualization to support comprehension and reasoning by viewing abstract visual representations as physical scenes with a set of implied dynamics between objects. Inferences based on these implied dynamics are metaphorically extended to form inferences about the represented information. This view predicts that even seemingly meaningless properties of a visualization, including such minor design elements as borders, background areas, and the connectedness of parts, may affect how people perceive semantic aspects of data by suggesting different potential dynamics between data points. We present a study that supports this claim and discuss the design implications of this theory of information visualization.

Theories typically emphasize affordances or intentions as the primary determinant of an object’s perceived function. The HIPE theory assumes that people integrate both into causal models that produce functional attributions. In these models, an object’s physical structure and an agent’s action specify an affordance jointly, constituting the immediate causes of a perceived function. The object’s design history and an agent’s goal in using it constitute distant causes. When specified fully, the immediate causes are sufficient for determining the perceived function—distant causes have no effect (the causal proximity principle). When the immediate causes are ambiguous or unknown, distant causes produce inferences about the immediate causes, thereby affecting functional attributions indirectly (the causal updating principle). Seven experiments supported HIPE’s predictions. Function is a central construct in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience. Cognitive psychologists have shown that the categorization of an artifact depends not only on its physical properties, but also on its function (e.g., Barton & Komatsu, 1989; Keil,

The Neural Theory of Language project aims to build structured connectionist models of language and cognition consistent with constraints from all domains and at all levels. These constraints include recent experimental evidence that details of neural computation and brain architecture play a crucial role in language processing. We focus in this paper on the computational level and explore the role of embodied representations and simulative inference in language understanding. 1.

We address the question “How do people learn new concepts? ” from the perspective of

Consider two individuals, John and Mary, who each possess a number of concepts. How can we determine that John and Mary both have a concept of, say, Horse? John and Mary may not have exactly the same knowledge of horses, but it is important to be able to place their horse concepts into correspondence with one another, if only so that we can say things like, “Mary’s concept of horse is much more sophisticated than John’s. ” Concepts should be public in the sense that they can be possessed by more than one person (Fodor, 1998; Fodor & Lepore, 1992), and for this to be the possible, we must be able to determine correspondences, or translations, between two individuals ’ concepts. There have been two major approaches in cognitive science to conceptual meaning that could potentially provide a solution to finding translations between conceptual systems. According to an “external grounding” account, concepts ’ meanings depend on their connection to the external world (this account is more thoroughly defined in the next section). By this account, the concept Horse means what it does because our perceptual apparatus can identify features that characterize horses. According to what we will call a “Conceptual web ” account, concepts ’ meanings depend on their connections to each other. By this account, Horse’s meaning depends on Gallop, Domesticated, and Quadruped, and in turn, these concepts depend on other concepts, including Horse (Quine & Ullian, 1970). In this chapter, we will first present a brief tour of some of the main proponents of conceptual web and external grounding accounts of conceptual meaning. Then, we will describe a computer algorithm that translates between conceptual systems. The initial goal of this computational work is to show how translating across systems is possible using only withinsystem relations, as is predicted by a conceptual web account. However, the subsequent goal is to show how the synthesis of external and internal information can dramatically improve translation. This work suggests that the external grounding and conceptual web accounts should not be