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On the generation of shared symbols
Abstract and Figures
Despite the multiple semantic ambiguities present in every utterance during natural language use, people are remarkably efficient in establishing mutual understanding. This chapter illustrates how the study of human communication in novel settings provides a window into the mechanisms supporting the human competence to rapidly generate and understand novel shared symbols, capturing the joint construction of meaning across interacting agents. In this chapter, we discuss empirical findings and computational hypotheses generated in the context of an experimentally-controlled non-verbal interactive task that throw light on these fundamental properties of human referential communication. The neural evidence reviewed here points to mechanisms shared across interlocutors of a communicative interaction. Those neural mechanisms implement predictions based on presumed knowledge and beliefs of the communicative partner. Computationally, the generation of novel meaningful symbolic representations might rely on cross-domain analogical mappings. Those mappings provide a mechanism for systematically augmenting individual pre-existing representations, adjusting them to the current conversational context.
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... These choices are what lay the foundation for a relation that separates the observing system from its environment. In the field of cognitive poetics, attention to embodiment and enaction have given rise to a growing awareness of the importance of context in the production of meaning (see Bergen, 2016Bergen, , 2015Gibbs & Colston, 2012;Rasse et al., 2020;Stolk, Blokpoel, van Rooij, & Toni, 2015). 4 Because system/environment observations are semiotic and get interpreted as meaning, a ratchet effect occurs, where this new meaning produces new constraints on the system that in turn affect future choices. ...
Poetry is a process. While people typically refer to poems as textual objects, our experience of poetry is inherently embodied and enacted, meaning that we experience poems as events that we contextualize as gestalt representations. We experience metaphors, too, as processes, which arise from experiential gestalts, that extend gestalt structures and lay the conceptual foundation for our experience of the world. This article argues that, like metaphors, poetic gestalts can be mapped onto other experiences to help people navigate their worlds. While this kind of poetic thought has largely been considered by scholars to have existed only since the emergence of the modern human mind sometime in the last 60,000 years, the author suggests that poetic thought likely arose prior to modern cognition, and may have in fact given rise to it. A crucial aspect of the embodied and enactive approach to poetry outlined in the article is that people’s experience of poetry is fundamentally contextual and emotional. Furthermore, because emotions are a primary source of meaning, our emotional responses to poetry make it a useful tool for extending our own conceptual apparatuses, enhancing emotional intelligence, and for generating shared values.
... Could analogies provide a generative principle for hypothesizing possible interpretations of signals [48,49,92]? Could the combination of an analogical 'meaning hypothesizer' with a context-dependent selection mechanism lead to the generation of communicative signals interpretable by that addressee on first exposure [93]? ...
We share our thoughts with other minds, but we do not understand how. Having a common language certainly helps, but infants' and tourists' communicative success clearly illustrates that sharing thoughts does not require signals with a pre-assigned meaning. In fact, human communicators jointly build a fleeting conceptual space in which signals are a means to seek and provide evidence for mutual understanding. Recent work has started to capture the neural mechanisms supporting those fleeting conceptual alignments. The evidence suggests that communicators and addressees achieve mutual understanding by using the same computational procedures, implemented in the same neuronal substrate, and operating over temporal scales independent from the signals' occurrences. State-of-the-art artificial agents such as the virtual assistants on our phones are powered by associative deep-learning algorithms. Yet those agents often make communicative errors that, if made by real people, would lead us to question their mental capacities.We argue that these communicative errors are a consequence of focusing on the statistics of the signals we use to understand each other during communicative interactions.Recent empirical work aimed at understanding our communicative abilities is showing that human communicators share concepts, not signals.The evidence shows that communicators and addressees achieve mutual understanding by using the same computational procedures, implemented in the same neuronal substrate, and operating over temporal scales independent from the signals' occurrences.
... Brain stimulation for epilepsy: can scheduled or responsive neurostimulation stop seizures? Curr OpinNeurol 19,[164][165][166][167][168] Morrell, M.J., 2011. Responsive cortical stimulation for the treatment of medically intractable partial epilepsy.Neurology 77, 1295Neurology 77, -1304 Murro, A.M.,King, D.W., Smith, J.R., Gallagher, B.B., Flanigin, H.F., Meador, K., 1991. ...
Inspired by conflicting messages about language teaching in current GCSE and A level English Language guidance, this investigation hypothesises that the long-standing issue of English teachers lacking knowledge about language (KAL) could be the result of contradictory language ideologies (LIs) affecting English teachers’ cognition. LIs are the shared beliefs, attitudes and values about language and its usage, and are mostly implicitly expressed in discourses ostensibly concerned with other topics such as migration and indeed, education. As such, this research’s hypothesis provokes two subsidiary research questions: 1. What LIs are English teachers exposed to both as members of the secondary English teaching Community of Practice (CoP) and as members of contemporary British society? And, 2. How can one locate such LIs?
To identify potential LIs that English teachers encounter, a corpus linguistics approach is taken in combination with critical discourse analysis (CL-CDA). This investigation proposes selecting nodes drawn from frequency lists, as well as commonly used nodes such as language names to locate a wide range of potential LIs. To identify LIs that teachers in England are exposed to, three corpora are investigated: two large news corpora and one consisting of secondary English teaching materials, as these corpora represent the LI discourses that teachers are likely to encounter.
Using insights from lexical priming and combined discourse analysis with cognitive linguistics, this investigation argues that LIs conveyed through evaluative language shapes English teachers’ cognition, primarily because of conflicting messages in hegemonic LI discourses, which teachers have to assimilate and act upon without guidance or support. The research concludes that since hegemonic, non-linguistic LIs are overwhelmingly present in both popular and in educational discourses (where these conflict with explicit linguistically informed LI), they are a likely contributory factor to English teachers’ lack of metalinguistic awareness.
This chapter introduces semiotics, the study of signs, which includes signals as biological communication among animals and words as abstract symbols among humans. It focuses on zoosemiotics, the study of biological signals involving the various sensory apparatus that animals possess, as they send, receive, process, and react to those signals in different ways, emphasizing the communication behavior of non-human primates which may be related to that of humans.
Purpose
This paper reviews research developments in semiosis (sign activity) as theorized by Peirce, Eco and Sebeok, focusing specifically on the current study of “semiotic threshold zones,” which range from the origins of life through various nonhuman life forms to artificial life forms, including those symbolic thresholds most familiar to library and information science (LIS) researchers. The intent is to illustrate potential opportunities for LIS research beyond its present boundaries.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper provides a framework that describes six semiotic threshold zones (presemiotic, protosemiotic, phytosemiotic, zoosemiotic, symbolic and polysemiotic) and notable work being done by researchers in each.
Findings
While semiotic researchers are still defining the continuum of semiotic thresholds, this focus on thresholds can provide a unifying framework for significance as human and nonhuman interpretations of a wide variety of signs accompanied by a better understanding of their relationships becomes more urgent in a rapidly changing global environment.
Originality/value
Though a variety of semiotic-related topics have appeared in the LIS literature, semiotic thresholds and their potential relationships to LIS research have not been previously discussed there. LIS has traditionally tasked itself with the recording, dissemination and preservation of knowledge, and in a world that faces unprecedented environmental and global challenges for all species, the importance of these thresholds may well be considered as part of our professional obligations in potentially documenting and archiving the critical differences in semiosis that extend beyond purely human knowledge.
Damage to the human ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) leads to profound changes in everyday social interactions [1, 2]. Yet, in the lab, vmPFC patients show surprising proficiency in reasoning about other agents [3-8]. These conflicting observations suggest that what vmPFC patients lack in everyday social interactions might be the ability to guide their decisions with knowledge about a social partner [9-13], despite preserved access to that knowledge [2, 14]. Quantification of socially relevant decisions during live interaction with different partners offers the possibility of testing this hypothesis. Eight patients with vmPFC damage, eight patients with brain damage elsewhere, and 15 healthy participants were asked to communicate non-verbally with two different addressees, an adult or a child, in an experimentally controlled interactive setting [15, 16]. In reality, a confederate blindly performed the role of both adult and child addressee, with matched performance and response times, such that the two addressees differed only in terms of the communicator's beliefs. Patients with vmPFC damage were able-and motivated-to generate communicatively effective behaviors. However, unlike patient and healthy controls, vmPFC patients failed to adjust their communicative decisions to the presumed abilities of their addressee. These findings indicate that the human vmPFC is necessarily involved in social interactions, insofar as those interactions need to be tailored toward knowledge about a social partner. In this perspective, the known contribution of this region to disparate domains like value-based decision-making [17-19], schema-based memory-processing [20-22], and person-specific mentalizing [11-13] might be instances of decisions based on contingently updated conceptual knowledge.
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Significance
Building on recent electrophysiological evidence showing that novel communicative behavior relies on computations that operate over temporal scales independent from transient sensorimotor behavior, here we report that those computations occur simultaneously in pairs with a shared communicative history, but not in pairs without a shared history. This pair-specific interpersonal synchronization was driven by communicative episodes in which communicators needed to mutually adjust their conceptualizations of a signal’s use. That interpersonal cerebral synchronization was absent when communicators used stereotyped signals. These findings indicate that establishing mutual understanding is implemented through simultaneous in-phase coordination of cerebral activity across communicators, consistent with the notion that pair members temporally synchronize their conceptualizations of a signal’s use.
Analogy is the core of all thinking.
This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer Prize–winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work. Hofstadter has been grappling with the mysteries of human thought for over thirty years. Now, with his trademark wit and special talent for making complex ideas vivid, he has partnered with Sander to put forth a highly novel perspective on cognition.
We are constantly faced with a swirling and intermingling multitude of ill-defined situations. Our brain’s job is to try to make sense of this unpredictable, swarming chaos of stimuli. How does it do so? The ceaseless hail of input triggers analogies galore, helping us to pinpoint the essence of what is going on. Often this means the spontaneous evocation of words, sometimes idioms, sometimes the triggering of nameless, long-buried memories.
Why did two-year-old Camille proudly exclaim, “I undressed the banana!”? Why do people who hear a story often blurt out, “Exactly the same thing happened to me!” when it was a completely different event? How do we recognize an aggressive driver from a split-second glance in our rearview mirror? What in a friend’s remark triggers the offhand reply, “That’s just sour grapes”? What did Albert Einstein see that made him suspect that light consists of particles when a century of research had driven the final nail in the coffin of that long-dead idea?
The answer to all these questions, of course, is analogy-making—the meat and potatoes, the heart and soul, the fuel and fire, the gist and the crux, the lifeblood and the wellsprings of thought. Analogy-making, far from happening at rare intervals, occurs at all moments, defining thinking from top to toe, from the tiniest and most fleeting thoughts to the most creative scientific insights.
Like Gödel, Escher, Bach before it, Surfaces and Essences will profoundly enrich our understanding of our own minds. By plunging the reader into an extraordinary variety of colorful situations involving language, thought, and memory, by revealing bit by bit the constantly churning cognitive mechanisms normally completely hidden from view, and by discovering in them one central, invariant core—the incessant, unconscious quest for strong analogical links to past experiences—this book puts forth a radical and deeply surprising new vision of the act of thinking.
This book will be a landmark text for all those interested in animal communication. Animal Vocal Communication explicitly avoids human-centred concepts and approaches and links communication to fundamental biological processes instead. It offers a conceptual framework - assessment/management - that allows us to integrate detailed studies of communication with an understanding of evolutionary perspectives. Self-interested assessment is placed on par with the signal production (management) side of communication, and communication is viewed as reflecting regulatory processes. Signals are used to manage the behaviour of others by exploiting their active assessment. The authors contend that it is this interplay between management and assessment that results in the functioning and evolution of animal communication; it is what communicative behaviour accomplishes that is important, not what information is conveyed.
This volume defends an integrated account of the psychological mechanisms underlying "mindreading," the commonplace capacity to understand the mind. The authors maintain that it is, as commonsense would suggest, vital to distinguish between reading others' minds and reading one's own. In reading other minds, the imagination plays a central role. As a result, the authors begin with an explicit and systematic account of pretense and imagination which proposes that pretense representations are contained in a separate mental workspace, the "Possible World Box," which is part of the basic architecture of the human mind. The mechanisms subserving pretense get recruited in reading other minds, a capacity that implicates multifarious kinds of processes, including those favored by simulation approaches to mindreading, those favored by information-based approaches, and processes that don't fit into either category. None of these mechanisms or processes, though, explains how we read our own minds, which, according to the authors, requires invoking an entirely independent set of mechanisms. © Shaun Nichols and Stephen P. Stich, 2003. All rights reserved.
