When left is "right". Motor fluency shapes abstract concepts

Right- and left-handers implicitly associate positive ideas like "goodness" and "honesty" more strongly with their dominant side of space, the side on which they can act more fluently, and negative ideas more strongly with their nondominant side. Here we show that right-handers' tendency to associate "good" with "right" and "bad" with "left" can be reversed as a result of both long- and short-term changes in motor fluency. Among patients who were right-handed prior to unilateral stroke, those with disabled left hands associated "good" with "right," but those with disabled right hands associated "good" with "left," as natural left-handers do. A similar pattern was found in healthy right-handers whose right or left hand was temporarily handicapped in the laboratory. Even a few minutes of acting more fluently with the left hand can change right-handers' implicit associations between space and emotional valence, causing a reversal of their usual judgments. Motor experience plays a causal role in shaping abstract thought.     

Fuzziness of concepts and concepts of fuzziness

It has been a vexing question in recent years whether concepts are fuzzy. In this paper several views on the fuzziness of concepts are pointed out to have stemmed from dubious concepts of fuzziness. The underlying notions of the roles feasibly played byprototype, set, andprobability in modeling concepts strongly suggest that the controversy originates from a vague relation between intuitive and mathematical ideas in the cognitive sciences. It is argued that the application of fuzzy sets cannot resolve this vagueness since they are one sided,viz., defined on sets. An alternative definition based on classes (in the sense of axiomatic set theory) is proposed.     

When standards are wide of the mark: nonselective superiority and inferiority biases in comparative judgments of objects and concepts

People are frequently required to judge how particular group members measure up against others in their group. According to the local-comparisons-general-standards (LOGE) approach, in these member-to-group comparisons, people fail to use the normatively appropriate local (group) standard and are infelicitously affected by a more general standard (involving instances from outside the judged group). Within positive groups, target group members are judged superior to the other members of the group, and within negative groups, inferior. To date, these nonselective superiority and inferiority biases have been demonstrated solely in judgments about human beings. In 6 experiments, nonselective biases were found in perceptual, affective, and cognitive judgments of nonhuman targets, objects, and concepts, thus supporting a cognitive rather than a social account.     

Comparative concepts

Comparative concepts such as greener than or higher than are ways of ordering objects. They are fundamental to our grasp of gradable concepts, that is, the type of meanings expressed by gradable general terms, such as ??is green?? or ??is high??, which are embeddable in comparative constructions in natural language. Some comparative concepts seem natural, whereas others seem gerrymandered. The aim of this paper is to outline a theoretical approach to comparative concepts that bears both on the account of naturalness for comparative concepts and on the theory of gradable concepts. The approach is novel in that it carries some basic assumptions from Peter G?rdenfors?? conceptual spaces account of categorical concepts over to comparative concepts. The offered approach is more general than G?rdenfors?? account in that it supplies a framework of graded categorisation that includes his categorisation rule as a limiting case. Importantly, it provides also a new argument for adopting G?rdenfors?? particular model of categorisation.     

Clinical concepts

In this section authors have written about the Winnicottian concept that they value most in their everyday working lives. This provides a valuable insight into the ways in which Winnicott's work is being used as a springboard for new ideas, as well as enlightening familiar ground. It is striking to see how the original Winnicottian idea takes on new form as it is taken up by new generations of clinicians. Despite the absence of a Winnicottian training school, his pervasive impact continues to influence current theory and practice.     

Spatial memory: how egocentric and allocentric combine

Recent experiments indicate the need for revision of a model of spatial memory consisting of viewpoint-specific representations, egocentric spatial updating and a geometric module for reorientation. Instead, it appears that both egocentric and allocentric representations exist in parallel, and combine to support behavior according to the task. Current research indicates complementary roles for these representations, with increasing dependence on allocentric representations with the amount of movement between presentation and retrieval, the number of objects remembered, and the size, familiarity and intrinsic structure of the environment. Identifying the neuronal mechanisms and functional roles of each type of representation, and of their interactions, promises to provide a framework for investigation of the organization of human memory more generally.     

Defective food concepts

Our aim in this paper is to employ conceptual negotiation to inform a method of rethinking defective food concepts, that is concepts that fail to suitably represent a certain food-related domain or that offer representations that run counter to the interests of their users. We begin by sorting out four dimensions of a food concept: (i) the data upon which it rests and the methodology by which those data are gathered; (ii) the ontology that sustains it; (iii) the social acts that serve to negotiate and establish the concept; (iv) and the aims and values that it fosters. We then discuss the conditions that make a food concept defective, pointing out four types of defects—fragility, polarization, incoherence, and schizophrenia—which we illustrate by means of two specific examples: local food and healthy food.

     

What concepts do

This paper identifies and criticizes a line of reasoning that has played a substantial role in the widespread rejection of the view that Fodor has dubbed “Concept Atomism”. The line of reasoning is not only fallacious, but its application in the present case rests on a misconception about the explanatory potential of Concept Atomism. This diagnosis suggests the possibility of a new polemical strategy in support of Concept Atomism. The new strategy is more comprehensive than that which defenders of the view, namely Fodor, have employed.