Author(s):  
L Ceravolo ◽  
S Schaerlaeken ◽  
S Frühholz ◽  
D Glowinski ◽  
D Grandjean

Abstract Integrating and predicting the intentions and actions of others are critical components of social interactions, but the behavioral and neural bases of such mechanisms under altered perceptual conditions are poorly understood. In the present study, we recruited expert violinists and age-matched controls with no musical training and asked them to evaluate simplified dynamic stimuli of violinists playing in a piano or forte communicative intent while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. We show that expertise is needed to successfully understand and evaluate communicative intentions in spatially and temporally altered visual representations of musical performance. Frontoparietal regions—such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the inferior parietal lobule and sulcus—and various subregions of the cerebellum—such as cerebellar lobules I-IV, V, VI, VIIb, VIIIa, X—are recruited in the process. Functional connectivity between these brain areas reveals widespread organization, particularly in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus, inferior parietal sulcus and in the cerebellum. This network may be essential to successfully assess communicative intent in ambiguous or complex visual scenes.


Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8 (106)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Yulia Arnautova

The article deals with the heuristic potential of early medieval collections of saints' miracles (libri miraculorum, miracula) which are rarely studied in anthropologically oriented historiography, because they are literary fiction and, unlike the 12—17th century miracula, cannot serve as sources for studying folk piety or everyday life. Using the example of St. Willehadi's miracles (Miracula s. Willehadi, 860—865) by Bishop Ansgar of Bremen, the article analyzes the possibility of involving texts considered “unreliable” in terms of the facts described in them, within the framework of the cognitive theory of communication. The approach to the miraculous text as a message containing meaning-generating representations, which have a distinctly expressed communicative intent, allows to reassess its content, which in traditional studies is usually devalued as “hagiographic topics”, and to establish the pragmatic function of the text (causa scribendi), which is not always limited to the proof of the sanctity of the hero.


Author(s):  
Michael Rochemont

Distinguishing between two forms of givenness status,knownandsalient, this chapter investigates the latter, using deaccenting as a probe into the nature of salience-based givenness. A presuppositional account of salience-based givenness is presented, based on entailment and coreference. Other putative semantic relations claimed to underlie givenness-based deaccenting are shown to be inadequate. The question whether givenness can be reduced to focus is considered, with motivation provided for distinguishing among given, focused, and discourse new. It is seen that the distribution of accenting and deaccenting in English is only partly a function of context, with speaker’s communicative intent playing a critical and unpredictable role.


2004 ◽  
Vol 27 (6) ◽  
pp. 732-733 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse M. Bering ◽  
Todd K. Shackelford

Atran & Norenzayan's (A&N's) target article effectively combines the insights of evolutionary biology and interdisciplinary cognitive science, neither of which alone yields sufficient explanatory power to help us fully understand the complexities of supernatural belief. Although the authors' ideas echo those of other researchers, they are perhaps the most squarely grounded in neo-Darwinian terms to date. Nevertheless, A&N overlook the possibility that the tendency to infer supernatural agents' communicative intent behind natural events served an ancestrally adaptive function.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry S. Cheang ◽  
Marc D. Pell

The goal of the present research was to determine whether certain speaker intentions conveyed through prosody in an unfamiliar language can be accurately recognized. English and Cantonese utterances expressing sarcasm, sincerity, humorous irony, or neutrality through prosody were presented to English and Cantonese listeners unfamiliar with the other language. Listeners identified the communicative intent of utterances in both languages in a crossed design. Participants successfully identified sarcasm spoken in their native language but identified sarcasm at near-chance levels in the unfamiliar language. Both groups were relatively more successful at recognizing the other attitudes when listening to the unfamiliar language (in addition to the native language). Our data suggest that while sarcastic utterances in Cantonese and English share certain acoustic features, these cues are insufficient to recognize sarcasm between languages; rather, this ability depends on (native) language experience.


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