Do Lemmas Speak German? A Verb Position Effect in German Structural Priming

Lexicalized theories of syntax often assume that verb‐structure regularities are mediated by lemmas, which abstract over variation in verb tense and aspect. German syntax seems to challenge this assumption, because verb position depends on tense and aspect. To examine how German speakers link these elements, a structural priming study was performed which varied syntactic structure, verb position (encoded by tense and aspect), and verb overlap. Abstract structural priming was found, both within and across verb position, but priming was larger when the verb position was the same between prime and target. Priming was boosted by verb overlap, but there was no interaction with verb position. The results can be explained by a lemma model where tense and aspect are linked to structural choices in German. Since the architecture of this lemma model is not consistent with results from English, a connectionist model was developed which could explain the cross‐linguistic variation in the production system. Together, these findings support the view that language learning plays an important role in determining the nature of structural priming in different languages.     

THE HUMAN BEING SHAPING AND TRANSCENDING ITSELF: WRITTEN LANGUAGE,BRAIN, AND CULTURE

Recent theological anthropology emphasizes a dynamic and integral understanding of the human being, which is also related to Karl Rahner's idea of active self‐transcendence and to the imago Dei doctrine. The recent neuroscientific discovery of the “visual word form area” for reading, regarded in light of the concept of cultural neural reuse, will produce fresh implications for the interrelation of brain biology and human culture. The theological and neuroscientific parts are shown in their mutual connections thus articulating the notion that human beings shape and transcend themselves both at the biological and at the cultural level. This will have relevant implications for the timely topic of human uniqueness in science and theology, and in proposing a new research perspective in which theology may consider culture along with its biological import, but not necessarily in strictly evolutionary terms alone.     

Body ownership: When feeling and knowing diverge

Individuals with the peculiar disturbance of ‘overcompleteness’ experience an intense desire to amputate one of their healthy limbs, describing a sense of disownership for it (Body Integrity Identity Disorder – BIID). This condition is similar to somatoparaphrenia, the acquired delusion that one’s own limb belongs to someone else. In ten individuals with BIID, we measured skin conductance response to noxious stimuli, delivered to the accepted and non-accepted limb, touching the body part or simulating the contact (stimuli approach the body without contacting it), hypothesizing that these individuals have responses like somatoparaphrenic patients, who previously showed reduced pain anticipation, when the threat was directed to the disowned limb. We found reduced anticipatory response to stimuli approaching, but not contacting, the unwanted limb. Conversely, stimuli contacting the non-accepted body-part, induced stronger SCR than those contacting the healthy parts, suggesting that feeling of ownership is critically related to a proper processing of incoming threats.     

Abduction: A categorical characterization

Scientific knowledge is gained by the informed (on the basis of theoretic ideas and criteria) examination of data. This can be easily seen in the context of quantitative data, handled with statistical methods. Here we are interested in other forms of data analysis, although with the same goal of extracting meaningful information. The idea is that data should guide the construction of suitable models, which later may lead to the development of new theories. This kind of inference is called abduction and constitutes a central procedure called Peircean qualitative induction. In this paper we will present a category-theoretic representation of abduction based on the notion of adjunction, which highlights the fundamental fact that an abduction is the most efficient way of capturing the information obtained from a large body of evidence.     

The mind–body problem and the role of pain: cross-fire between Leibniz and his Cartesian readers

This article is about the exchanges between Leibniz, Arnauld, Bayle and Lamy on the subject of pain. The inability of Leibniz’s system to account for the phenomenon of pain is a recurring objection of Leibniz’s seventeenth-century Cartesian readers to his hypothesis of pre-established harmony: according to them, the spontaneity of the soul and its representative nature cannot account for the affective component of pain. Strikingly enough, this problem has almost never been addressed in Leibniz studies, or only incidentally, through the more general problem of evil. My purpose in this article is to clarify Leibniz’s psychophysical parallelism by opposing his representationist account of pain to the functionalist account endorsed by Arnauld, Bayle, Lamy and Malebranche.     

Probing Representations of Gymnastics Movements: A Visual Priming Study

In this study, we designed a visual short‐term priming paradigm to investigate the mechanisms underlying the priming of movements and to probe movement representations in motor experts and matched controls. We employed static visual stimuli that implied or not human whole‐body movements, that is, gymnastics movements and static positions. Twelve elite female gymnasts and twelve matched controls performed a speeded two‐choice response time task. The participants were presented with congruent and incongruent prime‐target pairs and had to decide whether the target stimulus represented a gymnastics movement or a static position. First, a visual priming effect was observed in the two groups. Second, a stimulus–response rote association could not easily account for our results. Novel primes never presented as targets could also prime the targets. Third, by manipulating three levels of prime‐target relations in moving congruent pairs, we demonstrated that the more similar prime‐target pairs, the greater the facilitation in target. Lastly, gymnastics motor expertise impacted on priming effects.     

空间再定向任务中心理表征的多样性——来自虚拟现实实验的证据

成人和儿童完成空间再定向的具体过程与内在机制一直是研究者们关注的问题,在空间中是否形成了关于环境的整体表征是其中的一个关键。研究者们的观点并不一致,研究结果也提供了不同的证据。使用传统的空间再定向任务在此问题上难以得到明确的结论。本研究采用虚拟现实技术,让被试在虚拟现实环境中观察所在空间,然后直接向被试呈现空间的俯视视角并要求完成位置再认。通过对正确率和反应时的模式分析,发现被试反应可以划分为三种类型：整体的、独立于视角的心理表征（各方向均为高正确率低反应时）;整体的、依赖于方向的心理表征（正确率和反应时在不同方向上差异显著）和视角匹配的心理表征（各方向上均为低正确率）。三种不同的表征形式在人群中同时存在,并且在同一个体身上表现出不稳定性。