Walking the Walk While Thinking About the Talk: Embodied Interpretation of Metaphorical Narratives

Two sets of experiments examined people’s embodied understanding of metaphorical narratives. Participants heard one of two stories about a romantic relationship; either one that was successful or one that was not, that initially described it in metaphorical terms as “Your relationship was moving along in a good direction” or nonmetaphorical terms as “Your relationship was very important to you.” Participants were then blindfolded and attempted to accurately walk, or imagine walking, to a marker 40 feet away while they thought about the story they just heard. People who heard about the successful metaphorical story walked longer and further than those presented with the unsuccessful relationship story. But these walking and imagining differences disappeared when the critical metaphorical statement “moving along in a good direction” was replaced by a nonmetaphorical expression. These findings, and those from another set of experiments, suggest that people’s understanding of metaphorical narratives is partly based on their embodied simulations of the metaphorical actions referred to in these stories.     

Misunderstanding metaphor: What's the problem?

In order to investigate the potential difficulties posed by task demands and by surface features of metaphorical sentences, children aged 6, 7, and 9 years were presented with metaphorical grounds encoded in five alternative linguistic forms: predicative metaphors, topicless metaphors, similes, analogies, and riddles. The task demands posed by comprehension of predicative metaphors proved greater than those posed by topicless metaphors, suggesting that it is more difficult to specify the similarity between two given terms than it is to generate a missing term. When topicless metaphors were rewritten either in an explicit analogic form or in the form of a riddle, comprehension was increased; however, when predicative metaphors were rewritten as similies, the addition of the term “like” to make clear the similarity relationship between the two terms failed to elevate understanding.     

Children's recognition of the usefulness of a record: Distinguishing deterministic and probabilistic events

Children aged six, eight, and ten years were asked to decide which of two devices—one deterministically functioning and the other probabilistically functioning—they wanted to keep a record of in order to find out whether or not the device worked properly. The devices were a ball-dropping device (deterministic) and a spinner (probabilistic). To investigate the devices, the children were asked to observe—and potentially record—only as many events as necessary in order to determine the function of each device with sufficient certainty. Children investigated both devices first in a rigged and then in a natural state. In Experiment 1, only the ten year olds showed a good understanding of a record's relative usefulness for investigating the functioning of the probabilistic in preference to the deterministic device. Younger children did not adapt the record keeping to the different kinds of functioning. This might have been related to their difficulties in understanding the deterministic character of the ball-dropping device, therefore its deterministic character was made more salient in Experiment 2. However, this manipulation did not change the results. In both experiments, only the ten year olds appeared to have a good understanding of the fact that a decision about the probabilistic nature of an event sequence requires a relatively large number of observations and therefore, if faced with a choice, a record is more useful for the investigation of probabilistic than deterministic phenomena.     

Pictorial and lexical priming: Patterns of implicit memory in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease patients

Lexical and pictorial priming were examined in patients with Alzheimer's disease and in demented and nondemented patients with Parkinson's disease. Control subjects were divided into young and elderly. Lexical priming used a word‐stem completion task. Pictorial priming task was based on Rey's superimposed pictures test. Elderly normal subjects demonstrated lower lexical priming scores than those of young subjects. Analysis of covariance with age and educational level as covariates showed that normal controls, demented and nondemented Parkinsonian patients, and Alzheimer patients did not differ significantly on the lexical priming task. Pictorial priming scores did not differ significantly between elderly and younger controls. In contrast there was a striking impairment of pictorial priming in Parkinsonian patients, both demented and nondemented. Performance of subjects with mild Alzheimer's disease was superior to that of nondemented Parkinsonian patients. Our results suggest that performance in lexical priming task diminishes with physiological ageing but is unaffected by mild or moderate Alzheimer's disease. Our study also observes the existence of a selective pictorial priming deficit in Parkinson's disease; however, this deficit is not specific, as it is also observed to a lesser degree in Alzheimer's disease. It may therefore be concluded that the systems serving pictorial priming are both cortical and subcortical.     

Bears are for boys: Metaphorical associations in young children's gender stereotypes

Objects may be gender typed by virtue of their use by or association with one sex or the other or because they embody qualities that show a nonliteral or metaphorical correspondence to characteristics of or beliefs about males and females. For Study 1, we developed the Gender Stereotyping Test, a sorting task with which we determined that 4-, 5-, and 7-year-olds make use of both types of information in assigning objects or qualities to each sex. Study 2 replicated results with a new group of 4-year-olds and found that children whose test scores indicated at least some knowledge of gender identity were more likely to gender type metaphorical, but not conventional, items than those whose scores failed to indicate stable and constant knowledge of gender identity. In Study 3, which used a truncated version of the sorting task, children at age 3 made minimal use of either type of information. Gender stereotypes are considered in terms of recent theories of metaphor as a conceptual mechanism by which what is known in or about one domain is projected to another domain for the purpose of understanding.     

Emergence of drawing devices for total and partial occlusion: a longitudinal study

The developmental emergence of two drawing devices was investigated in young children: the use of omission (ie not drawing any of a hidden object) to depict total occlusion and the use of hidden line elimination (HLE, ie deleting only that part of an object that is hidden from view) to depict partial occlusion in a three-dimensional scene. Three groups of school children (5, 6, and 7 years old) were tested individually with two tasks four times over a 2-year period. One task called for the omission device (to draw a cup with its handle not in view) and the other for the HLE device (to draw one ball behind and partially occluded by another). The stimuli in each task were presented in pairs, with one member of the pair showing the occluded scene and the other a canonical or not-occluded scene. Changes in the strategies used by the children to indicate the visual differences within the pairs were recorded over the four testing sessions. Children were found to use the omission device more readily with the cup task than the HLE device with the ball task. There was an age-related trend in every task in the use of the drawing device appropriate to that task. For those who did not use the drawing device appropriate for a perspective drawing, there was a tendency for each age group to favour a particular strategy for representation. The advantage of using a longitudinal design to chart the developmental trend of the emergence of these two drawing devices is discussed.     

Macintosh analogue of the rotary pursuit task

Pursuit tracking, a perceptual motor-skill task, has had wide application in many areas of psychology. The task is usually administered with a mechanical device in which subjects try to maintain a contact between a stylus and a disk on a rotating platter. A pursuit-tracking task that can be administered on a Macintosh computer is described. Subjects try to keep a crosshair cursor on top of a moving circular target. The cursor can be controlled by commonly used Macintosh ADB devices such as a joystick. The computer version has several important advantages: it offers more task flexibility and more accurate dependent measures of performance, and it is inexpensive.     

道德的轻与重：道德的重量具身效应及隐喻的调节作用

本研究采用行为反应时和事件相关电位(ERP)探讨道德的重量具身效应及“重量-道德”隐喻联结对该效应的调节作用。参考内隐联想测验的逻辑，采用联合分类反应任务，在默认的“重量-道德”隐喻表征情境（实验1）和道德垂直空间隐喻的启动情境（实验2）中，要求被试分别使用轻鼠标和重鼠标对道德/不道德词进行分类判断，考察鼠标重量对道德概念的加工所产生的影响。结果显示，在默认情境中，“重-道德，轻-不道德”的联合分类条件比“轻-道德，重-不道德”条件的分类反应时更短，并伴随有更大的脑电晚期正成分（LPC），而在启动道德垂直空间隐喻后，两种联合分类条件下的反应时和LPC结果出现反转。本研究结果表明道德概念的加工会受到重量经验的影响，“重量-道德”具身效应具有心理现实性，且重量概念与道德概念的隐喻联结引导并调节了这种具身效应。     

权力概念垂直空间隐喻表征激活的条件

本研究通过3个实验考察权力概念垂直空间隐喻表征激活的条件。实验1发现,在权力判断任务中,具有直接权力关系的相关词对和间接权力关系的无关词对都可以激活隐喻表征。实验2使用相关判断任务,只有相关词对激活了隐喻表征。这说明对词汇进行语义加工并理解权力关系是激活隐喻表征的重要条件。实验3引入水平方向干扰,并将被试的注意转移到干扰信息上,结果仍然出现了隐喻一致性效应,表明垂直空间线索不是隐喻表征激活的必要条件。     

How children learn to draw realistic pictures

Children of ages 5 to 17 years were given a real scene to draw from a fixed viewpoint. Their drawings were classified according to the type of drawing system used, and given a score for the number of correct representations of occlusion by overlap. Six classes of drawing system used were identified, and it was found that with increasing age children were able to use an increasingly complex type of system. This development appeared to take place in discrete stages and covered the whole age range tested. Increase in the ability to use overlap as a pictorial device appeared to be continuous; below the age of 9 few children made use of overlap, and rapid learning took place between the ages of 10 and 12. It is argued that the use of these two pictorial devices requires different abilities; and that learning to use a particular type of drawing system does not depend directly on perception or on learning culturally determined stereotypes but in its demands on creative ability closely resembles the acquisition of language.     

Event valence and spatial metaphors of time

Recent research suggests that people's understanding of the abstract domain of time is dependent on the more concrete domain of space. Boroditsky and Ramscar (2002) found that spatial context influences whether people see themselves as moving through time (ego-moving perspective) or as time moving towards them (time-moving perspective). Based on studies of the embodiment of affective experience, we examined whether affect might also influence which spatial metaphor of time people adopt. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 showed that participants who imagined a negative event were more likely to report that the event was approaching them, whereas those who imagined a positive event were more likely to report that they were approaching the event. Experiments 3a and 3b showed that participants judge an event to be more positive if it is described from the ego-moving perspective than if it is described from the time-moving perspective. Results from these studies provide initial evidence that positive and negative events are associated with different spatial metaphors of time.     

特征整合与加工深度对道德概念容器隐喻联结的影响

提出了隐喻提取假说将隐喻联结的形成和提取进行分离, 并通过3个实验探究了道德概念与容器空间的隐喻联结及其受知觉加工深度和特征整合程度的影响。实验1采用空间Stroop范式, 实验2a和实验2b均采用启动范式, 实验3a和实验3b均采用加入任务要求的Stroop范式。结果发现：(1)在经典Stroop范式中未发现道德概念与容器空间的隐喻联结; (2)在启动范式中发现, 较深知觉加工深度下道德概念与容器空间存在较弱的隐喻联结; (3)在较高特征整合程度的Stroop任务中, 道德概念与容器空间存在较强的隐喻联结。结果表明：道德概念与容器空间存在道德为内、不道德为外的隐喻联结, 这种隐喻联结在映射上表现为双向性, 并且受到特征整合程度和知觉加工深度的影响, 同时也为隐喻提取假说提供了证据支持。     

The relationship between theory of mind and metaphor: Evidence from children with language impairment and autistic spectrum disorder

Happé (1993) proposed that theory of mind (ToM) understanding was necessary for comprehension of metaphorical expressions. The current study investigated the role of both ToM and language ability in metaphor understanding. Ninety‐four children aged 8–15 years with communication impairments were grouped according to language ability and autistic symptomatology in the first instance, and then according to ToM performance. Their performance on a metaphor task was compared to 34 typically developing age‐matched peers. These analyses showed that only children with language impairment, with or without concurrent autistic features, were impaired on the metaphor task. Furthermore, possession of first‐order ToM skills did not ensure metaphor comprehension. Instead, semantic ability was a stronger predictor of performance on the metaphor task. These results are considered with reference to the view that ToM understanding is necessary for the comprehension of metaphor.     

References for motor tasks--gender differences across age in motor performance: a meta-analysis

In 1985 we published a meta-analysis of gender differences across age in motor performance in Psychological Bulletin, but it did not include an indexing of each motor task to the references from which it was obtained. This paper provides a table listing the 20 motor tasks and the references from which data for each task were taken. The range of tasks was from fundamental movements (e.g., catching, jumping, running, throwing) to motor fitness (e.g., agility, arm hang, balance, grip strength) to perceptual-motor abilities (e.g., anticipation timing, fine eye-motor coordination, pursuit-rotor tracking, reaction time). The arm hang was represented in the fewest papers (n = 2) while the dash and long jump were most frequently referenced (n = 21).     

Development of ability to perceive and produce pictorial depth cue of overlapping.

The perception of the pictorial depth cue of overlapping was studied in children 3, 5, and 7 yr. old. Both a sequential and a simultaneous picture/object-matching task were used to test sensitivity. All age groups successfully perceived the depth relation information provided by pictorial overlapping. Height on the picture plane, which projectively covaries with overlapping, was not consistently used as a depth cue by any age group. Children's drawings were also analyzed for the presence of distance information. The drawings of the 3- and 5-yr. old children contained no overlapping cues and indicated a general lack of understanding of the third demension behind the picture plane. Seven-yr.-old children showed the beginnings of this understanding through their use of size perspective and height on the picture plane as depth cues. For all ages the production of the overlapping cue lags behind its perception.     

Gesture and metaphor comprehension: Electrophysiological evidence of cross-modal coordination by audiovisual stimulation

In recent years, studies have suggested that gestures influence comprehension of linguistic expressions, for example, eliciting an N400 component in response to a speech/gesture mismatch. In this paper, we investigate the role of gestural information in the understanding of metaphors. Event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants viewed video clips of an actor uttering metaphorical expressions and producing bodily gestures that were congruent or incongruent with the metaphorical meaning of such expressions. This modality of stimuli presentation allows a more ecological approach to meaning integration. When ERPs were calculated using gesture stroke as time-lock event, gesture incongruity with metaphorical expression modulated the amplitude of the N400 and of the late positive complex (LPC). This suggests that gestural and speech information are combined online to make sense of the interlocutor’s linguistic production in an early stage of metaphor comprehension. Our data favor the idea that meaning construction is globally integrative and highly context-sensitive.     

Training to Generate Creative Metaphors by Reviving Dormant Analogies

Most creativity techniques encourage breaking away from stored knowledge and known solutions. Counter to this approach, this study assessed the effectiveness of an intervention based on introducing minimal variations to well-established knowledge structures. Two groups were tasked with generating creative metaphorical titles for short essays. While the experimental group had been trained in extending and reinstantiating conceptual metaphors, the control group had been trained on creativity techniques unrelated to the task. Training increased the number of novel metaphorical titles derived from conceptual metaphors, and these titles were more creative than novel metaphorical titles not derived from conceptual metaphors. Finally, the titles generated via the deliberate use of the trained heuristics were as creative as those of the same type that were spontaneously produced by the control group. The implications for interventions to promote creativity are discussed.     

Why Feynman Diagrams Represent

There are two distinct interpretations of the role that Feynman diagrams play in physics: (i) they are calculational devices, a type of notation designed to keep track of complicated mathematical expressions; and (ii) they are representational devices, a type of picture. I argue that Feynman diagrams not only have a calculational function but also represent: they are in some sense pictures. I defend my view through addressing two objections and in so doing I offer an account of representation that explains why Feynman diagrams represent. The account that I advocate is a version of that defended by Kendall Walton, which provides us with a basic characterization of the way that representations in general work and is particularly useful for understanding distinctively pictorial representations – in Walton’s terms, depictions. The question of the epistemic function of Feynman diagrams as pictorial representations is left for another time.     

JUMPING TOGETHER: A WAY FROM SOCIOBIOLOGY TO BIO‐SOCIO‐HUMANITIES

Sociobiology is a grand narrative of evolutionary biology on which to build unified knowledge. Consilience is a metaphorical representation of that narrative. I take up the same metaphor but apply it differently. I evoke the image of jumping together, not on solid ground but on the strong, flexible canvas sheet of a trampoline, on which natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities jump together. This image overlaps with the traditional East Asian way of understanding—that is, the “Heaven‐Earth‐Person Triad.” Using recent insights from cognitive science—metaphor, embodiment, and conceptual blending—I propose the alternative way of “bio‐socio‐humanities” to understand and experience the world.