Language and space: some interactions

Is language linked to mental representations of space? There are several reasons to think that language and space might be separated in our cognitive systems, but they nevertheless interact in important ways. These interactions are evident in language viewed as a means of communication and in language considered a form of representation. In communication, spatial factors may be explicit in language itself, such as the spatial-gestural system of American Sign Language. Even the act of conversing with others is a spatial behavior because we orient to the locations of other participants. Language and spatial representations probably converge at an abstract level of concepts and simple spatial schemas.     

Scientific aesthetics: Three steps forward

Leder and Nadal (2014, this issue) examine the current state of scientific aesthetics through the lens of a prescient psychological model proposed 10 years ago. These retrospective points to several future directions of which I touch on three: the nature of aesthetic emotions, the time course of emotions in aesthetic episodes, and the relationship of art and evolution.     

Face gender recognition in developmental prosopagnosia: Evidence for holistic processing and use of configural information

Face identification deficits in developmental prosopagnosics (DPs) have been thought to be due to general difficulties with processing configural face information and integrating configural and parts information into a coherent whole (holistic processing). Gender recognition provides a further opportunity to more fully examine this issue as this ability may be intact in DPs and it has been shown to depend on processing configural information and holistic processing in neurotypical individuals. In the present study we first determined that, indeed, gender discrimination performance was similar in DPs and controls. Second, we found that inversion and scrambling (which we propose measures holistic processing and sensitivity to configural information, respectively) produced comparable deficits in DPs and controls, suggesting that both groups use holistic processing and configural information to recognize gender. This indicates that holistic processing and using configural face information are not general impairments in DP and may be more specific to face identity.     

Weigh(t)ing for Awareness

We wished to learn if weight perception can be extinguished by studying two patients with right hemisphere brain damage. When lifting weights simultaneously, a patient with right frontal damage was not biased in her judgments of which weight was heavier. By contrast, a patient with right parietal damage reported left-sided weights as being lighter than those on the right. Psychophysical power functions revealed that her awareness of increasing weights on the left was dampened compared to the right when lifting weights individually on each side. Strikingly, her awareness of weight changes on the left was completely abolished when she lifted weights in both hands simultaneously. She demonstrated an unusual split in awareness, being motorically aware of and actively engaged with left-sided weights while being unaware of their incremental changes.     

Gettier Across Cultures1

In this article, we present evidence that in four different cultural groups that speak quite different languages (Brazil, India, Japan, and the USA) there are cases of justified true beliefs that are not judged to be cases of knowledge. We hypothesize that this intuitive judgment, which we call “the Gettier intuition,” may be a reflection of an underlying innate and universal core folk epistemology, and we highlight the philosophical significance of its universality.     

Humility: An Emerging Construct in Moral Psychology

The virtue of humility is lauded by most authorities but opinions of what it is, what it includes and what it does not are multifarious. Religious and philosophical traditions in India stress its role in emancipating the ego and providing an understanding for one’s perspective as contrasted against the magnanimity of the Almighty, the Supernatural or the Universe. Most academicians within the scientific psychological realm also look upon humility as a virtue. Accredited as a powerful tool for personal, social and organisational well-being, humility, as a moral construct, deserves a thorough and detailed exploration to reveal what it entails, what its corollaries are and how it can be measured. It is particularly useful in Indian context, as indigenous traditions have always emphasised humility. However, such efforts have remained relatively neglected till recent years. Of course, a few researchers with emphasis on moral and positive psychology have probed and prodded this concept to lay bare its comprising elements and to build tools to measure it. These attempts have been discussed here. Information was culled from surveying the scientific literature of the past four decades from psychological and philosophical journals and handbooks. Its overlap with Indian concept of humility has been discussed, and the unresolved questions about its nuances are put forward for future research endeavour.     

The simultaneous activation hypothesis: explaining recovery from deep to phonological dyslexia

Deep dyslexia evolved into phonological dyslexia in one patient. Semantic errors resolved while phonological and derivational errors persisted in reading. Nonword reading improved but remained inferior to word reading. Despite a residual semantic deficit naming improved. The Simultaneous Activation Hypothesis explains recovery from deep to phonological dyslexia and the continued dissociation between reading and naming errors. Partial recovery to all three reading routes increased constraints for word selection at the phonological output lexicon (POL) improving word reading. With recovery, the POL receives additional supportive information from the partially recovered direct oral reading route and grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (GPC) eliminating semantic errors in oral reading. Nonword reading also improved because of partial recovery to all three routes. Semantic errors in naming persisted because additional constraints were unavailable at the POL to activate a phonological entry. Phonological and derivational errors were more frequent in reading than in naming the result of incomplete GPC recovery. Residual nonword reading deficits resulted from incomplete GPC recovery, indicated by the persistence of neologisms in nonwords. The Simultaneous Activation Hypothesis readily accounts for the evolution from deep to phonological dyslexia.     

Language, perception, and the schematic representation of spatial relations

Schemas are abstract nonverbal representations that parsimoniously depict spatial relations. Despite their ubiquitous use in maps and diagrams, little is known about their neural instantiation. We sought to determine the extent to which schematic representations are neurally distinguished from language on the one hand, and from rich perceptual representations on the other. In patients with either left hemisphere damage or right hemisphere damage, a battery of matching tasks depicting categorical spatial relations was used to probe for the comprehension of basic spatial concepts across distinct representational formats (words, pictures, and schemas). Left hemisphere patients underperformed right hemisphere patients across all tasks. However, focused residual analyses using voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) suggest that (1) left hemisphere deficits in the representation of categorical spatial relations are difficult to distinguish from deficits in naming these relations and (2) the right hemisphere plays a special role in extracting schematic representations from richly textured pictures.