What Can We Learn from Urban Crisis?

The irreversible transition towards urban living entails complex challenges and vulnerabilities for citizens, civic authorities, and the management of global commons. Many cities remain beset by political, infrastructural, social, or economic fragility, with crisis arguably becoming an increasingly present condition of urban life. While acknowledging the intense vulnerabilities that cities can face, this article contends that innovative, flexible, and often ground-breaking policies, practices, and activities designed to manage and overcome fragility can emerge in cities beset by crisis. We argue that a deeper understanding of such practices and the knowledge emerging from contexts of urban crisis may offer important insights to support urban resilience and sustainable development. We outline a simple conceptual representation of the interrelationships between urban crisis and knowledge production, situate this in the context of literature on resilience, sustainability, and crisis, and present illustrative examples of real-world practices. In discussing these perspectives, we reflect on how we may better value, use, and exchange knowledge and practice in order to address current and future urban challenges.

Number to me, space to you: Joint representation of spatial-numerical associations

Recent work has shown that number concepts activate both spatial and magnitude representations. According to the social co-representation literature which has shown that participants typically represent task components assigned to others together with their own, we asked whether explicit magnitude meaning and explicit spatial coding must be present in a single mind, or can be distributed across two minds, to generate a spatial-numerical congruency effect. In a shared go/no-go task that eliminated peripheral spatial codes, we assigned explicit magnitude processing to participants and spatial processing to either human or non-human co-agents. The spatial-numerical congruency effect emerged only with human co-agents. We demonstrate an inter-personal level of conceptual congruency between space and number that arises from a shared conceptual representation not contaminated by peripheral spatial codes. Theoretical implications of this finding for numerical cognition are discussed.

Conceptual Metaphors of Emotion in Spoken Language: Good Is Up in Semantics and Prosody

<p>Recent research on embodied cognition points to a role for the perceptuomotor system in conceptual representation. One way that the perceptuomotor system may be involved in conceptual representation is through metaphorical mappings, as described in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). This theory accounts for the embodiment of abstract concepts with metaphoric mappings to perceptuomotor properties. Examples include INTELLIGENCE IS LIGHT (as in “that is a bright idea”), IMPORTANT IS BIG (as in “that is a big deal”), and INTIMACY IS CLOSENESS (as in “you are close to my heart”). The GOOD IS UP (as in “things are looking up”) conceptual metaphor is the focus of this thesis. A prediction derived from Conceptual Metaphor Theory is that activation of the concept of “good” should automatically activate associated perceptuomotor processes, resulting in an attentional shift to upper visual space. Conversely activation of the concept “bad” should result in an attentional shift to lower visual space. There is experimental evidence for the existence of the GOOD IS UP conceptual metaphor. However, this past research has only assessed the validity of the GOOD IS UP conceptual metaphor with written emotion-related words. In order to paint an accurate picture of the nature of conceptual representation, both written and spoken language processing must be investigated. The aim of this thesis was to determine whether the conceptual metaphor GOOD IS UP is activated by processing of spoken emotional words. Spoken language has two channels through which emotion can be conveyed; the semantic channel and the prosodic channel. This thesis assessed whether the GOOD IS UP conceptual metaphor was activated by emotional semantics and prosody separately. Semantically or prosodically valenced words were presented to participants. Positive and negative valence would be expected to elicit activation of the GOOD IS UP conceptual metaphor; thus GOOD IS UP congruent shifts in attention were expected. Following presentation of the spoken word, a visual target detection and identification task was completed to assess attention to upper and lower space. No metaphor congruent shifts in attention were observed, which suggests that the GOOD IS UP conceptual metaphor was not activated when words with semantic or prosodic emotion were processed. A thorough evaluation is provided of the differences between the previous studies, using written stimuli, and the current studies, using spoken stimuli. The discrepancies suggest that it is theoretically important to define the boundary conditions under which evidence for conceptual metaphor congruent activation is (and is not) seen. Whether context is an important boundary condition especially needs to be considered. A multiple systems view of representation may need to be applied to Conceptual Metaphor Theory.</p>

Conceptual Metaphors of Emotion in Spoken Language: Good Is Up in Semantics and Prosody

<p>Recent research on embodied cognition points to a role for the perceptuomotor system in conceptual representation. One way that the perceptuomotor system may be involved in conceptual representation is through metaphorical mappings, as described in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). This theory accounts for the embodiment of abstract concepts with metaphoric mappings to perceptuomotor properties. Examples include INTELLIGENCE IS LIGHT (as in “that is a bright idea”), IMPORTANT IS BIG (as in “that is a big deal”), and INTIMACY IS CLOSENESS (as in “you are close to my heart”). The GOOD IS UP (as in “things are looking up”) conceptual metaphor is the focus of this thesis. A prediction derived from Conceptual Metaphor Theory is that activation of the concept of “good” should automatically activate associated perceptuomotor processes, resulting in an attentional shift to upper visual space. Conversely activation of the concept “bad” should result in an attentional shift to lower visual space. There is experimental evidence for the existence of the GOOD IS UP conceptual metaphor. However, this past research has only assessed the validity of the GOOD IS UP conceptual metaphor with written emotion-related words. In order to paint an accurate picture of the nature of conceptual representation, both written and spoken language processing must be investigated. The aim of this thesis was to determine whether the conceptual metaphor GOOD IS UP is activated by processing of spoken emotional words. Spoken language has two channels through which emotion can be conveyed; the semantic channel and the prosodic channel. This thesis assessed whether the GOOD IS UP conceptual metaphor was activated by emotional semantics and prosody separately. Semantically or prosodically valenced words were presented to participants. Positive and negative valence would be expected to elicit activation of the GOOD IS UP conceptual metaphor; thus GOOD IS UP congruent shifts in attention were expected. Following presentation of the spoken word, a visual target detection and identification task was completed to assess attention to upper and lower space. No metaphor congruent shifts in attention were observed, which suggests that the GOOD IS UP conceptual metaphor was not activated when words with semantic or prosodic emotion were processed. A thorough evaluation is provided of the differences between the previous studies, using written stimuli, and the current studies, using spoken stimuli. The discrepancies suggest that it is theoretically important to define the boundary conditions under which evidence for conceptual metaphor congruent activation is (and is not) seen. Whether context is an important boundary condition especially needs to be considered. A multiple systems view of representation may need to be applied to Conceptual Metaphor Theory.</p>

EXPRESS: Articulatory suppression delays processing of abstract words: the role of inner speech

Compared to concrete concepts, like “book”, abstract concepts expressed by words like “justice” are more detached from sensorial experiences, even though they are also grounded in sensorial modalities. Abstract concepts lack a single object as referent and are characterized by higher variability both within and across participants. According to the Word as Social Tool (WAT) proposal, owing to their complexity, abstract concepts need to be processed with the help of inner language. Inner language can namely help participants to re-explain to themselves the meaning of the word, to keep information active in working memory, and to prepare themselves to ask information from more competent people. While previous studies have demonstrated that the mouth is involved during abstract concepts’ processing, both the functional role and the mechanisms underlying this involvement still need to be clarified. We report an experiment in which participants were required to evaluate whether 78 words were abstract or concrete by pressing two different pedals. During the judgment task, they were submitted, in different blocks, to a baseline, an articulatory suppression, and a manipulation condition. In the last two conditions, they had to repeat a syllable continually and to manipulate a softball with their dominant hand. Results showed that articulatory suppression slowed down the processing of abstract more than that of concrete words. Overall results confirm the WAT proposal’s hypothesis that abstract concepts processing involves the mouth motor system and specifically inner speech. We discuss the implications for current theories of conceptual representation.

Visual discrimination of primate species based on faces in chimpanzees

Many primate studies have investigated discrimination of individual faces within the same species. However, few studies have looked at discrimination between primate species faces at the categorical level. This study systematically examined the factors important for visual discrimination between primate species faces in chimpanzees, including: colour, orientation, familiarity and perceptual similarity. Five adult female chimpanzees were tested on their ability to discriminate identical and categorical (non-identical) images of different primate species faces in a series of touchscreen matching-to-sample experiments. Discrimination performance for chimpanzee, gorilla and orangutan faces was better in colour than in greyscale. An inversion effect was also found, with higher accuracy for upright than inverted faces. Discrimination performance for unfamiliar (baboon and capuchin monkey) and highly familiar (chimpanzee and human) but perceptually different species was equally high. After excluding effects of colour and familiarity, difficulty in discriminating between different species faces can be best explained by their perceptual similarity to each other. Categorical discrimination performance for unfamiliar, perceptually similar faces (gorilla and orangutan) was significantly worse than unfamiliar, perceptually different faces (baboon and capuchin monkey). Moreover, Multidimensional Scaling analysis of the image similarity data based on local feature matching revealed greater similarity between chimpanzee, gorilla and orangutan faces than between human, baboon and capuchin monkey faces. We conclude our chimpanzees appear to perceive similarity in primate faces in a similar way to humans. Information about perceptual similarity is likely prioritised over the potential influence of previous experience or a conceptual representation of species for categorical discrimination between species faces.

Minimodel of semantic synthesis of Russian sentences

A formal linguistitic model is presented, which produces, for a given conceptual representation of an extralinguistic situation, a corresponding semantic representation [SemR] that, in its turn, underlies the deep-syntactic representations of four near-synonymous Russian sentences expressing the starting information. Two full-fledged lexical entries are given for the lexemes besporjadki ‘disturbance’ and stolknovenie ‘clash(N)’, appearing in these sentences. Some principles of lexicalization – that is, matching the formal lexicographic definitions to the starting semantic representation in order to produce the deep-syntactic structures of the corresponding sentences – are formulated and illustrated; the problem of approximate matching is dealt with in sufficient detail.

Effect of time constraints on the conceptual representation of metaphor processing

What shapes the conceptual representation during metaphor processing? In this paper, we investigate this question by studying the roles of both embodied simulation and linguistic distributional patterns. Researchers have propose that the linguistic component is shallow and speedy, ideal as a shortcut to construct crude representations and conserve valuable cognitive resources. Thus, during metaphor processing, people should rely on the linguistic component more if the goal of processing is shallow and the time available is limited. Here, we present two pre-registered experiments which aim to evaluate this hypothesis. The results supported the role of simulation in metaphor processing, but not the linguistic shortcut hypotheses: the effect of linguistic distributional frequency increased as people had more time to process the metaphors, and as they engaged in deep processing. Furthermore during shallow processing, the processing was easier when the embodied and linguistic components support each other. These findings indicate a complex interaction between the embodied and linguistic components during metaphor processing.