Interactions of reading and semantics along the ventral visual processing stream

Converging evidence supports a distributed-plus-hub view of semantic processing, in which there are distributed modular semantic sub-systems (e.g., for shape, colour, and action) connected to an amodal semantic hub. Furthermore, object semantic processing of colour and shape, and lexical reading and identification, are processed mainly along the ventral stream, while action semantic processing occurs mainly along the dorsal stream. In Experiment 1, participants read a prime word that required imagining either the object or action referent, and then named a lexical word target. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants performed a lexical decision task (LDT) with the same targets as in Experiment 1, in the presence of foils that were legal nonwords (NW; Experiment 2) or pseudohomophones (PH; Experiment 3). Semantic priming was similar in effect size regardless of prime type for naming, but was greater for object primes than action primes for the LDT with PH foils, suggesting a shared-stream advantage when the task demands focus on orthographic lexical processing. These experiments extend the distributed-plus-hub model, and provide a novel paradigm for further research.     

The influence of speech rate and accent on access and use of semantic information

Circumstances in which the speech input is presented in sub-optimal conditions generally lead to processing costs affecting spoken word recognition. The current study indicates that some processing demands imposed by listening to difficult speech can be mitigated by feedback from semantic knowledge. A set of lexical decision experiments examined how foreign accented speech and word duration impact access to semantic knowledge in spoken word recognition. Results indicate that when listeners process accented speech, the reliance on semantic information increases. Speech rate was not observed to influence semantic access, except in the setting in which unusually slow accented speech was presented. These findings support interactive activation models of spoken word recognition in which attention is modulated based on speech demands.     

Black Mountain College: A Creative Art Space Where It Was Safe to Fail

Black Mountain College is remembered as an artistic utopian alternative to institutional learning. Its faculty and students included some of the most important creative thinkers of the 20th century. Its foundation was built on the philosophy of “learning by doing.” But what made Black Mountain such a dynamic educational environment? Today, the financial burden of higher education places a lasting strain on students that inhibits creative growth. Does the educational structure of the college system impede our learning? Black Mountain was a legendary educational experiment, which offers a model for contemporary art education.     

Usage of semantic representations in recognition memory

Meanings of words facilitate false acceptance as well as correct rejection of lures in recognition memory tests, depending on the experimental context. This suggests that semantic representations are both directly and indirectly (i.e., mediated by perceptual representations) used in remembering. Studies using memory conjunction errors (MCEs) paradigms, in which the lures consist of component parts of studied words, have reported semantic facilitation of rejection of the lures. However, attending to components of the lures could potentially cause this. Therefore, we investigated whether semantic overlap of lures facilitates MCEs using Japanese Kanji words in which a whole-word image is more concerned in reading. Experiments demonstrated semantic facilitation of MCEs in a delayed recognition test (Experiment 1), and in immediate recognition tests in which participants were prevented from using phonological or orthographic representations (Experiment 2), and the salient effect on individuals with high semantic memory capacities (Experiment 3). Additionally, analysis of the receiver operating characteristic suggested that this effect is attributed to familiarity-based memory judgement and phantom recollection. These findings indicate that semantic representations can be directly used in remembering, even when perceptual representations of studied words are available.     

Narcissistic configurations: Violence and its absence in treatment

'On narcissism: An introduction' constitutes a turning point in psychoanalysis. Although narcissism is a concept which has not been explicitly referred to by many important thinkers for decades, it could be said that there is no paper written in psychoanalysis since Freud that does not implicitly take into account the modifi cations in thinking that the work brought about. In this paper, the author contrasts two types of narcissistic confi gurations: in the fi rst, the intolerance of the other is dealt with by expulsion and violence; in the second, by withdrawal. The author contrasts patients who express manifest violent behaviour with patients for whom the violent behaviour is absent but who, nevertheless, present similar background histories, which might have led to a prediction of violence. They are also profoundly different in terms of what they provoke in the countertransference. In addition, this paper argues that the treatment of narcissistic personalities has allowed in recent years the understanding of a modality of depression. Following Green, the author argues that, instead of a fruitless debate that involves evolutionary issues around the concept of narcissism, it is necessary to distinguish the narcissistic aspect in any analytic relationship, to identify the narcissistic transference in different types of psychopathologies.     

Logic programs and connectionist networks

One facet of the question of integration of Logic and Connectionist Systems, and how these can complement each other, concerns the points of contact, in terms of semantics, between neural networks and logic programs. In this paper, we show that certain semantic operators for propositional logic programs can be computed by feedforward connectionist networks, and that the same semantic operators for first-order normal logic programs can be approximated by feedforward connectionist networks. Turning the networks into recurrent ones allows one also to approximate the models associated with the semantic operators. Our methods depend on a well-known theorem of Funahashi, and necessitate the study of when Funahashi's theorem can be applied, and also the study of what means of approximation are appropriate and significant.     

Correlation between gray/white matter volume and cognition in healthy elderly people

This study applied volumetric analysis and voxel-based morphometry (VBM) of brain magnetic resonance (MR) images to assess whether correlations exist between global and regional gray/white matter volume and the cognitive functions of semantic memory and short-term memory, which are relatively well preserved with aging, using MR image data from 109 community-dwelling healthy elderly individuals. We used the Information and Digit Span subtests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligent Scale-Revised as measures of semantic memory and short-term memory, respectively. We found significant positive correlations between the gray matter ratio, the percentage of gray matter volume in the intracranial volume, and performance on the Digit Span subtest, and between the regional gray matter volumes of the bilateral anterior temporal lobes and performance on the Information subtest. No significant correlations between performance on the cognitive tests and white matter volume were found. Our results suggest that individual variability in specific cognitive functions that are relatively well preserved with aging is accounted for by the variability of gray matter volume in healthy elderly subjects.     

Computational exploration of metaphor comprehension processes using a semantic space model

Recent metaphor research has revealed that metaphor comprehension involves both categorization and comparison processes. This finding has triggered the following central question: Which property determines the choice between these two processes for metaphor comprehension? Three competing views have been proposed to answer this question: the conventionality view ( Bowdle & Gentner, 2005 ), aptness view ( Glucksberg & Haught, 2006b ), and interpretive diversity view ( Utsumi, 2007 ); these views, respectively, argue that vehicle conventionality, metaphor aptness, and interpretive diversity determine the choice between the categorization and comparison processes. This article attempts to answer the question regarding which views are plausible by using cognitive modeling and computer simulation based on a semantic space model. In the simulation experiment, categorization and comparison processes are modeled in a semantic space constructed by latent semantic analysis. These two models receive word vectors for the constituent words of a metaphor and compute a vector for the metaphorical meaning. The resulting vectors can be evaluated according to the degree to which they mimic the human interpretation of the same metaphor; the maximum likelihood estimation determines which of the two models better explains the human interpretation. The result of the model selection is then predicted by three metaphor properties (i.e., vehicle conventionality, aptness, and interpretive diversity) to test the three views. The simulation experiment for Japanese metaphors demonstrates that both interpretive diversity and vehicle conventionality affect the choice between the two processes. On the other hand, it is found that metaphor aptness does not affect this choice. This result can be treated as computational evidence supporting the interpretive diversity and conventionality views.     

Iconic gestures prime words

Using a cross-modal semantic priming paradigm, both experiments of the present study investigated the link between the mental representations of iconic gestures and words. Two groups of the participants performed a primed lexical decision task where they had to discriminate between visually presented words and nonwords (e.g., flirp). Word targets (e.g., bird) were preceded by video clips depicting either semantically related (e.g., pair of hands flapping) or semantically unrelated (e.g., drawing a square with both hands) gestures. The duration of gestures was on average 3,500 ms in Experiment 1 but only 1,000 ms in Experiment 2. Significant priming effects were observed in both experiments, with faster response latencies for related gesture-word pairs than unrelated pairs. These results are consistent with the idea of interactions between the gestural and lexical representational systems, such that mere exposure to iconic gestures facilitates the recognition of semantically related words.