When the body is time: spatial and temporal deixis in children with visual impairments and sighted children

Ultimate Grounding of Abstract Concepts: A Graded Account

Abstraction, one of the hallmarks of human cognition, continues to be the topic of a strong debate. The primary disagreement concerns whether or not abstract concepts can be accounted for within the scope of embodied cognition. In this paper, we introduce the embodied approach to conceptual knowledge and distinguish between embodiment and grounding, where grounding is the general term for how concepts initially acquire their meaning. Referring to numerous pieces of empirical evidence, we emphasise that, ultimately, all concepts are acquired via interaction with the world via two main pathways: embodiment and social interaction. The first pathway is direct and primarily involves action/perception, interoception and emotions. The second pathway is indirect, being mediated by language in particular. Evidence from neuroscience, psychology and cognitive linguistics shows these pathways have different properties, roles in cognition and temporal profiles. Human development also places revealing constraints on how children develop the ability to reason more abstractly as they grow up. We recognize language as a crucial cognitive faculty with several roles enabling the acquisition of abstract concepts indirectly. Three detailed case studies on body-specificity hypothesis, abstract verbs and mathematics are used to argue that a compelling case has accumulated in favour of the ultimate grounding of abstract concepts in an agent’s interaction with its world, primarily relying on the direct pathway. We consolidate the debate through multidisciplinary evidence for the idea that abstractness is a graded, rather than a binary property of concepts.

Time Points: A Gestural Study of the Development of Space-Time Mappings

Human languages typically employ a variety of spatial metaphors for time (e.g., “I'm looking forward to the weekend”). The metaphorical grounding of time in space is also evident in gesture. The gestures that are performed when talking about time bolster the view that people sometimes think about regions of time as if they were locations in space. However, almost nothing is known about the development of metaphorical gestures for time, despite keen interest in the origins of space–time metaphors. In this study, we examined the gestures that English‐speaking 6‐to‐7‐year‐olds, 9‐to‐11‐year‐olds, 13‐to‐15‐year‐olds, and adults produced when talking about time. Participants were asked to explain the difference between pairs of temporal adverbs (e.g., “tomorrow” versus “yesterday”) and to use their hands while doing so. There was a gradual increase across age groups in the propensity to produce spatial metaphorical gestures when talking about time. However, even a substantial majority of 6‐to‐7‐year‐old children produced a spatial gesture on at least one occasion. Overall, participants produced fewer gestures in the sagittal (front‐back) axis than in the lateral (left‐right) axis, and this was particularly true for the youngest children and adolescents. Gestures that were incongruent with the prevailing norms of space–time mappings among English speakers (leftward and backward for past; rightward and forward for future) gradually decreased with increasing age. This was true for both the lateral and sagittal axis. This study highlights the importance of metaphoricity in children's understanding of time. It also suggests that, by 6 to 7 years of age, culturally determined representations of time have a strong influence on children's spatial metaphorical gestures.

Enhancing Allocentric Spatial Recall in Pre-schoolers through Navigational Training Programme

Unlike for other abilities, children do not receive systematic spatial orientation training at school, even though navigational training during adulthood improves spatial skills. We investigated whether navigational training programme (NTP) improved spatial orientation skills in pre-schoolers. We administered 12-week NTP to seventeen 4- to 5-year-old children (training group, TG). The TG children and 17 age-matched children (control group, CG) who underwent standard didactics were tested twice before (T₀) and after (T₁) the NTP using tasks that tap into landmark, route and survey representations. We determined that the TG participants significantly improved their performances in the most demanding navigational task, which is the task that taps into survey representation. This improvement was significantly higher than that observed in the CG, suggesting that NTP fostered the acquisition of survey representation. Such representation is typically achieved by age seven. This finding suggests that NTP improves performance on higher-level navigational tasks in pre-schoolers.

Age of Acquisition Effects on Word Processing for Chinese Native Learners' English: ERP Evidence for the Arbitrary Mapping Hypothesis

The present study aimed at distinguishing processing of early learned L2 words from late ones for Chinese natives who learn English as a foreign language. Specifically, we examined whether the age of acquisition (AoA) effect arose during the arbitrary mapping from conceptual knowledge onto linguistic units. The behavior and ERP data were collected when 28 Chinese-English bilinguals were asked to perform semantic relatedness judgment on word pairs, which represented three stages of word learning (i.e., primary school, junior and senior high schools). A 3 (AoA: early vs. intermediate vs. late) × 2 (regularity: regular vs. irregular) × 2 (semantic relatedness: related vs. unrelated) × 2 (hemisphere: left vs. right) × 3 (brain area: anterior vs. central vs. posterior) within-subjects design was adopted. Results from the analysis of N100 and N400 amplitudes showed that early learned words had an advantage in processing accuracy and speed; there is a tendency that the AoA effect was more pronounced for irregular word pairs and in the semantic related condition. More important, ERP results showed early acquired words induced larger N100 amplitudes for early AoA words in the parietal area and more negative-going N400 than late acquire words in the frontal and central regions. The results indicate the locus of the AoA effect might derive from the arbitrary mapping between word forms and semantic concepts, and early acquired words have more semantic interconnections than late acquired words.

A Graphical Diagnostic Test for Two-Way Contingency Tables

<p>We propose and illustrate a new graphical method to perform diagnostic analyses in two-way contingency tables. In this method, one observation is added or removed from each cell at a time, whilst the other cells are held constant, and the change in a test statistic of interest is graphically represented. The method provides a very simple way of determining how robust our model is (and hence our conclusions) to small changes introduced to the data. We illustrate via four examples, three of them from real-world applications, how this method works.</p>

Neural correlates of visualizations of concrete and abstract words in preschool children: a developmental embodied approach

The neural correlates of visualization underlying word comprehension were examined in preschool children. On each trial, a concrete or abstract word was delivered binaurally (part 1: post-auditory visualization), followed by a four-picture array (a target plus three distractors; part 2: matching visualization). Children were to select the picture matching the word they heard in part 1. Event-related potentials (ERPs) locked to each stimulus presentation and task interval were averaged over sets of trials of increasing word abstractness. ERP time-course during both parts of the task showed that early activity (i.e., <300 ms) was predominant in response to concrete words, while activity in response to abstract words became evident only at intermediate (i.e., 300–699 ms) and late (i.e., 700–1000 ms) ERP intervals. Specifically, ERP topography showed that while early activity during post-auditory visualization was linked to left temporo-parietal areas for concrete words, early activity during matching visualization occurred mostly in occipito-parietal areas for concrete words, but more anteriorly in centro-parietal areas for abstract words. In intermediate ERPs, post-auditory visualization coincided with parieto-occipital and parieto-frontal activity in response to both concrete and abstract words, while in matching visualization a parieto-central activity was common to both types of words. In the late ERPs for both types of words, the post-auditory visualization involved right-hemispheric activity following a “post-anterior” pathway sequence: occipital, parietal, and temporal areas; conversely, matching visualization involved left-hemispheric activity following an “ant-posterior” pathway sequence: frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital areas. These results suggest that, similarly, for concrete and abstract words, meaning in young children depends on variably complex visualization processes integrating visuo-auditory experiences and supramodal embodying representations.

Event-related potential signatures of perceived and imagined emotional and food real-life photos

Although food and affective pictures share similar emotional and motivational characteristics, the relationship between the neuronal responses to these stimuli is unclear. Particularly, it is not known whether perceiving and imagining food and affective stimuli elicit similar event-related potential (ERP) patterns. In this study, two ERP correlates, the early posterior negativity (EPN) and the late positive potential (LPP) for perceived and imagined emotional and food photographs were investigated. Thirteen healthy volunteers were exposed to a set of food photos, as well as unpleasant, pleasant, and neutral photos from the International Affective Picture System. In each trial, participants were first asked to view a photo (perception condition), and then to create a visual mental image of it and to rate its vividness (imagery condition). The results showed that during perception, brain regions corresponding to sensorimotor and parietal motivational (defensive and appetitive) systems were activated to different extents, producing a graded pattern of EPN and LPP responses specific to the photo content - more prominent for unpleasant than pleasant and food content. Also, an EPN signature occurred in both conditions for unpleasant content, suggesting that, compared to food or pleasant content, unpleasant content may be attended to more intensely during perception and may be represented more distinctly during imagery. Finally, compared to LLP activation during perception, as well as imagery and perception of all other content, LPP activation was significantly reduced during imagery of unpleasant photos, suggesting inhibition of unwanted memories. Results are framed within a neurocognitive working model of embodied emotions.