On the Nature of Numerosity and the Role of Language in Developing Number Concepts: A Reply to Everett

Mapping Intimacies ◽

10.31235/osf.io/r52de ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Karenleigh A. Overmann ◽

Frederick L. Coolidge

Keyword(s):

Experimental Research ◽

Cognitive Processes ◽

Numerical Cognition ◽

Homo Sapiens ◽

Fundamental Question ◽

The Other ◽

Current Anthropology ◽

Symbolic Thinking ◽

Experimental Findings

We respond to Caleb Everett’s (2013) critique of our 2012 Current Anthropology article “Numerosity, Abstraction, and the Emergence of Symbolic Thinking.” We refute Everett’s criticisms, including his claim that we overemphasized paleoanthropological evidence in our argument, noting that recent experimental research in numerical cognition comprised 60% of our references. We also identify two key misunderstandings by Everett, first, the idea that numerosity is not uniform in extant Homo sapiens (we believe that experimental findings, including those of Everett himself, demonstrate that quantity perception is cross-culturally uniform) and second, the idea that language necessarily shapes human numerosity (in fact, the two are largely independent cognitive processes, and the evidence shows that numerosity, as a perceptual primitive, precedes language, not the other way around as argued by Everett). We note our focus on the fundamental question of how discrete quantities emerge out of the undifferentiated ‘many’, given numerosity, and reiterate our 2012 suggestion that the answer lies in the interaction of quantity appreciation with material scaffolds.

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Autonomy and the Ownership of Our Own Destiny: Tracking the External World and Human Behavior, and the Paradox of Autonomy

Philosophies ◽

10.3390/philosophies5030012 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 5 (3) ◽

pp. 12

Author(s):

Lorenzo Magnani

Keyword(s):

Human Behavior ◽

Cognitive Processes ◽

Human Dignity ◽

Common Knowledge ◽

External World ◽

The Other ◽

Moral Autonomy ◽

The Political ◽

Human Autonomy

Research on autonomy exhibits a constellation of variegated perspectives, from the problem of the crude deprivation of it to the study of the distinction between personal and moral autonomy, and from the problem of the role of a “self as narrator”, who classifies its own actions as autonomous or not, to the importance of the political side and, finally, to the need of defending and enhancing human autonomy. My precise concern in this article will be the examination of the role of the human cognitive processes that give rise to the most important ways of tracking the external world and human behavior in their relationship to some central aspects of human autonomy, also to the aim of clarifying the link between autonomy and the ownership of our own destinies. I will also focus on the preservation of human autonomy as an important component of human dignity, seeing it as strictly associated with knowledge and, even more significantly, with the constant production of new and pertinent knowledge of various kinds. I will also describe the important paradox of autonomy, which resorts to the fact that, on one side, cognitions (from science to morality, from common knowledge to philosophy, etc.) are necessary to be able to perform autonomous actions and decisions because we need believe in rules that justify and identify our choices, but, on the other side, these same rules can become (for example, as a result of contrasting with other internalized and approved moral rules or knowledge contents) oppressive norms that diminish autonomy and can thus, paradoxically, defeat agents’ autonomous capacity “to take ownership”.

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The Processing of Musical Prosody by Musical and Nonmusical Children

Music Perception An Interdisciplinary Journal ◽

10.2307/40285541 ◽

1992 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 93-125 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Claire Gérard ◽

Catherine Auxiette

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Processes ◽

Musical Training ◽

Experimental Studies ◽

Surface Structures ◽

The Other ◽

Music Production ◽

Simple Sentences ◽

Verbal Production ◽

Better Than

The surface structures of music and speech should coincide in musical prosody. Two processing systems have thus to be integrated, one devoted to the surface structure of speech, the other to that of music. This article is in two parts: a review of data on speech and music production and hearing, and two experimental studies on the synchronization between a rhythm and spoken sounds. In the first part, a comparison between some intensity and timing parameters that characterize the unfolding of spoken strings and of musical sequences is presented. Data from studies on performers (speakers, musicians) and listeners are compared with regard to spontaneous rates, location and duration of pauses, duration of sounds, and periodic occurrence of accents. In the second part, the ability to control the correspondence between taps and words is examined. Two experimental studies on 6-year-old children focus on the role of musical training. The reproductions of simple rhythms and simple sentences or onomatopoeias were analyzed as well as the coordination between a rhythmic sequence of taps and a spoken string. Young musicians succeeded better than nonmusicians of the same age in the synchronization between their verbal production and their motor accompaniment, mainly because they more markedly anticipated the musical string in which they integrated the spoken sounds subsequently. The results are discussed in relation to the acoustic, motor, and cognitive processes involved in the coordination of the two temporal strings.

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How ritual might create religion: A neuropsychological exploration

Archive for the Psychology of Religion ◽

10.1177/0084672420903112 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 42 (1) ◽

pp. 29-45

Author(s):

James W Jones

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Processes ◽

Homo Sapiens ◽

Social Groups ◽

Social Bonding ◽

Bodily Activity ◽

Robert Bellah ◽

Ritual Activity ◽

Ordinary Consciousness ◽

Evolutionary Role

Several models of the evolution of religion claim that ritual creates “religion” and gives it a positive evolutionary role. Robert Bellah suggests that the evolutionary roots of ritual lay in the play of animals. For Homo sapiens, Bellah argues, rituals generate a world of experience different from the world of everyday life, and that different world of experience is the foundation of later religious developments. Robin Dunbar points to trance dancing as the original religious behavior. Trance dancing both alters ordinary consciousness and generates trance experiences that will give rise to religious concepts and also, through the production of endorphins, bonds people into tight-knit social groups whose social bonding gives them a survival advantage. The role of ritual in social bonding has been well established through the research on the production of endorphins by synchronized activity and the role of endorphins in social bonding. The role of ritual in generating religious experience has been much less developed. Drawing on the extensive research on the ways in which bodily activity can impact and transform our sensory and cognitive processes, and the ways in which sensory and cognitive processes are neurologically connected with somatic processes, this article will propose one neuropsychological model of how ritual activity might give rise to religion. Starting from bodily activity means that here religion will be understood more as a set of practices and less as a set of beliefs. Theological implications of this model will be discussed.

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Diagnosis and Repair?

Swiss Journal of Psychology ◽

10.1024/1421-0185/a000135 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 73 (3) ◽

pp. 153-165

Author(s):

Regina Jucks ◽

Benjamin Brummernhenrich ◽

Bettina-Maria Becker ◽

Rainer Bromme

Keyword(s):

Speech Production ◽

Content Knowledge ◽

Cognitive Processes ◽

The Other ◽

Adaptive Instruction ◽

Face To Face ◽

Correct Information ◽

Medical Counseling ◽

Instructional Contexts

Responding to misconceptions is an essential part of adaptive instruction. Nevertheless, research on both tutoring and expert–layperson communication has identified at least two problems that online counselors share with both face-to-face and online tutors. First, they generally do not notice when laypersons’ understanding differs from correct content knowledge. Second, even when they do notice this discrepancy, they do not handle misconceptions appropriately (e.g., they simply present the correct information instead of explaining why the layperson’s understanding is incorrect). This paper presents two studies on experts’ responses to laypersons’ misconceptions in online medical counseling. The results indicate that experts do not address the misconceptions communicated by laypersons, even when they are aware that such misunderstandings exist. The discussion concentrates on two explanations for these results: One is related to the differences between reflection and speech production and the cognitive processes underlying the two operations, while the other concerns the role of face-threatening acts in instructional contexts.

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XML on the Web

Proceedings of the Symposium on HTML5 and XML ◽

10.4242/balisagevol14.milowski02 ◽

2014 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

R. Alexander Miłowski

Keyword(s):

Fundamental Question ◽

The Other ◽

Process Information ◽

Xml Documents ◽

Xml Web ◽

In The Beginning ◽

Web Developers ◽

The Web

In the beginning, many presumed we would move to a world where XML documents and the applications that processed them would proliferate across the Web. The Web looked like a bright place for markup; technologies like XSLT made their way into the browser and linking standards were on their way. Yet, it didn’t happen. As browsers strengthened their ability to process information, render HTML documents, display media assets, and deliver applications, the role of XML was either pushed to the other side or used as a way to deliver data to applications within the browser via AJAX. The potential mismatches between the wants of the Web developer and the generic, impoverished nature of the DOM led to the development of JSON. In places where they might once have used XML, web developers have moved in droves to using JSON and HTML. XML has been removed from its role to convey data to applications, shunted to the server, and labeled legacy by many. With an uphill, generational challenge to bring it back within favor, the fundamental question is: Do we really want XML on the Web?

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Contrast and Representations in Syntax

10.1093/oso/9780198817925.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Keyword(s):

Building Blocks ◽

Dual Role ◽

Fundamental Question ◽

The Other ◽

Syntactic Structures ◽

Parametric Variation ◽

Syntactic Theory ◽

The One ◽

Morphological System

Syntactic contrasts, the systems of grammatical oppositions that exist within individual languages, are typically formally encoded in terms of features. The nature of syntactic contrast is tied to a fundamental question in generative syntactic theory: What is universal in syntax (and in language more generally), and what is variable? This volume explores the dual role of features, on the one hand defining a set of paradigmatic contrasts, and other the other hand acting as the building blocks of syntactic structures and the drivers of syntactic operations. In both roles, features are increasingly seen as the locus of parametric variation. The identification of parameters with features has opened up new possibilities for exploring connections between the morphological system of a language and its syntax, and suggests a new role for featural contrast in syntactic theory. The papers collected here represent a diversity of topics, perspectives, and concerns, but are united by an interest in morphosyntactic representations, and in the formal encoding of syntactic contrasts.

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The Mute Zone of Social Representations and the Effects of (Un)Masking: Review and Prospects

RUDN Journal of Psychology and Pedagogics ◽

10.22363/2313-1683-2021-18-2-375-390 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 18 (2) ◽

pp. 375-390

Author(s):

Patrick Rateau ◽

Grégory Lo Monaco

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Processes ◽

Social Representations ◽

Fundamental Question ◽

The Other ◽

New Techniques ◽

Seminal Work ◽

Methodological Perspective ◽

The Social ◽

Community Of Researchers ◽

The One

Twenty years ago, Guimelli and Deschamps (2000) hypothesised the existence of the mute zone of social representations. According to the authors, certain parts of the social representations of objects, described as sensitive, were not expressed under normal survey conditions. This fundamental question was curiously addressed very late in literature on social representations, but has been having significant success within the community of researchers working in this field since then. This seminal work, which offered a methodological perspective capable of highlighting such unspoken facts, paved the way for studies that proposed several theoretical interpretations and new techniques for exploring this mute zone. The challenge was twofold: to identify the processes involved and to invent the appropriate tools to express the counter-normative contents potentially attached to certain objects of representation. This article proposes to take stock of these 20 years of research and to anticipate new avenues oriented on the one hand on the study of the socio-cognitive processes involved in the mute zone phenomenon, and on the other hand on the proposal of new theoretical and methodological articulations with other concepts dealing with similar issues.

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Culture, Memory, and Narrative Self-Making

Imagination Cognition and Personality ◽

10.1177/0276236617733827 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 37 (2) ◽

pp. 199-223 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Qi Wang ◽

Qingfang Song ◽

Jessie Bee Kim Koh

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Processes ◽

Meaning Making ◽

Well Being ◽

The Other ◽

Sense Making ◽

Narrative Self ◽

Self Identity ◽

Cultural Expectations ◽

The One

Narrative entails an active act of sense making through which individuals discern meaning from their experiences in line with their cultural expectations. In this article, we outline a theoretical model to demonstrate that narrative can be simultaneously used to examine cognitive processes underlying remembering on the one hand and to study the process of meaning-making that holds implications for self and well-being on the other. We argue that these two approaches, oftentimes overlapping and inseparable, provide critical means to understand the central role of culture in shaping memory and self-identity. We further demonstrate that the integration of culture in narrative research can, in turn, greatly enrich our understanding of the cognitive and social underpinnings of narrative.

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Elaborating the role of reflection and individual differences in the study of folk-economic beliefs

Behavioral and Brain Sciences ◽

10.1017/s0140525x18000274 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 41 ◽

Author(s):

Kevin Arceneaux

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Individual Differences ◽

Cognitive Processes ◽

Evolutionary History ◽

Behavioral Responses ◽

History Of ◽

Economic Beliefs

AbstractIntuitions guide decision-making, and looking to the evolutionary history of humans illuminates why some behavioral responses are more intuitive than others. Yet a place remains for cognitive processes to second-guess intuitive responses – that is, to be reflective – and individual differences abound in automatic, intuitive processing as well.

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