Applied Cognitive Psychology

This book represents a challenge to the traditional, symbolic view of cognition that knowledge is represented in the form of connections among amodal symbols, and that perceptual and motor information is fully translated into this language of amodal symbols before cognitive operations are performed on this information. The authors of the various chapters instead present evidence that perceptual and motor knowledge is recruited in the performance of a wide variety of cognitive tasks, suggesting that knowledge is represented in terms of one’s physical interactions with the environment. The book can be roughly divided into four sections. The first section provides evidence that the presentation of an object, either directly or through language, automatically causes one to bring to mind the various types of physical interactions afforded by that object. In particular, Borghi reviews a number of behavioural and neuroimaging studies demonstrating that when presented with an object or even an object noun, participants bring to mind information relevant to manipulation of that object such as its size, shape and orientation. Carlson and Kenny further demonstrate that the interpretation of spatial terms such as ‘above’, ‘below’ and ‘near’ is influenced not only by the geometry of a configuration of objects but also by the functions of those objects, again suggesting that when one is presented with an object, one brings to mind possible ways of interacting with that object. The second section tackles the longstanding problem of grounding abstract concepts such as TRUTH and POWER in perceptual and motor knowledge, using a variety of different approaches. First, Gibbs provides a number of examples of how people use metaphor to ground our understanding of abstract ideas such as thought, communication, political ideologies, illness and scientific theories in more basic, physical actions such as following a path, eating, breathing and balancing. The remaining authors in this section take a different approach, arguing that metaphor is not necessary for understanding many abstract concepts because these concepts are in fact associated with physical, perceptible content. In particular, Prinz argues that moral concepts such as GOOD and BAD are grounded in perceptions of changes in one’s bodily states associated with positive and negative emotional reactions. Consistent with this view, Glenberg et al. provides evidence that comprehension of emotional language requires one to simulate the described emotional state in one’s own body. Finally, Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings provide evidence that seemingly abstract concepts, such as TRUTH are in fact associated with concrete, physical situations involving different actors taking part in physical and mental actions, such as making verbal statements and comparing the content of those statements to the physical world. Thus, even such abstract concepts may be understood in terms of actions on and reactions to the environment. The third section examines the contribution of perception and action to the comprehension of language, the area of cognition in which the most forceful arguments have been made in favour of modular processes acting upon abstract, amodal symbols (see e.g. Pinker, 1994). In contrast to traditional linguistic theory, Langacker argues that the grammar of a sentence is closely linked to perceptual processes such as scanning a visual scene, with the detailed grammatical structure of a sentence, providing the instructions for scanning either a physical or hypothetical space. Furthermore, MacWhinney argues that the grammatical structure of a sentence instructs the listener from which perspective to view the described event, similar to adopting the physical viewpoint of one of the actors in the event. Zwaan and Madden further provide evidence that while interpreting a sentence, listeners perform mental simulations on the basis of prior perceptual experience with events similar to the one being described, representing unstated perceptual qualities of the event such as motions, spatial relations, the orientations of objects, and the perspective from which the event is viewed. Finally, Spivey et al. provide evidence that abstract verbs (e.g. obeyed, wanted) evoke spatial images in a highly consistent manner across speakers of a language, suggesting that