Music and Analogy

This chapter reviews recent research on analogy and explains how humans’ capacity for analogical thought shapes the production and comprehension of music. The chapter includes an introduction to Lawrence Barsalou’s perceptual symbol systems theory, which is used to explain how embodied experience informs analogical thought, especially that associated with music. Analogical reference, an idea adapted from Peirce’s concept of iconicity, is introduced, leading to a systematic definition of the sonic analogs for dynamic processes that provide the foundation for musical grammar. The chapter also explores how meaning can be constructed through sequences of musical sound.

Grounding Social Embodiment

Social embodiment research examines how thoughts, affect, and behavior is influenced by sensory, motor, and perceptual cues in the environment. It has repeatedly received criticism due to a focus on demonstration studies. Here, I aim to identify some of the possible reasons underlying the lack of theoretical progress. First, I warn against relying too strongly on inductive inferences due to the weak empirical support for social embodiment findings. Second, I will discuss two dominant theoretical frameworks in social embodiment research (conceptual metaphor theory and perceptual symbol systems theory) in light of their potential to inspire empirically testable hypotheses. Finally, I propose that one way to turn social embodiment research into a progressive research line is to integrate it more firmly with past theoretical work in social cognition, and focus on understanding the contexts in which concrete cues in the environment are salient and accessible enough to influence social inferences.

Neural Correlates of Concreteness in Semantic Categorization

In some contexts, concrete words (CARROT) are recognized and remembered more readily than abstract words (TRUTH). This concreteness effect has historically been explained by two theories of semantic representation: dual-coding [Paivio, A. Dual coding theory: Retrospect and current status. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 45, 255–287, 1991] and context-availability [Schwanenflugel, P. J. Why are abstract concepts hard to understand? In P. J. Schwanenflugel (Ed.), The psychology of word meanings (pp. 223–250). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991]. Past efforts to adjudicate between these theories using functional magnetic resonance imaging have produced mixed results. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we reexamined this issue with a semantic categorization task that allowed for uniform semantic judgments of concrete and abstract words. The participants were 20 healthy adults. Functional analyses contrasted activation associated with concrete and abstract meanings of ambiguous and unambiguous words. Results showed that for both ambiguous and unambiguous words, abstract meanings were associated with more widespread cortical activation than concrete meanings in numerous regions associated with semantic processing, including temporal, parietal, and frontal cortices. These results are inconsistent with both dual-coding and context-availability theories, as these theories propose that the representations of abstract concepts are relatively impoverished. Our results suggest, instead, that semantic retrieval of abstract concepts involves a network of association areas. We argue that this finding is compatible with a theory of semantic representation such as Barsalou's [Barsalou, L. W. Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 22, 577–660, 1999] perceptual symbol systems, whereby concrete and abstract concepts are represented by similar mechanisms but with differences in focal content.

Embodiment in Attitudes, Social Perception, and Emotion

Findings in the social psychology literatures on attitudes, social perception, and emotion demonstrate that social information processing involves embodiment, where embodiment refers both to actual bodily states and to simulations of experience in the brain's modality-specific systems for perception, action, and introspection. We show that embodiment underlies social information processing when the perceiver interacts with actual social objects (online cognition) and when the perceiver represents social objects in their absence (offline cognition). Although many empirical demonstrations of social embodiment exist, no particularly compelling account of them has been offered. We propose that theories of embodied cognition, such as the Perceptual Symbol Systems (PSS) account (Barsalou, 1999), explain and integrate these findings, and that they also suggest exciting new directions for research. We compare the PSS account to a variety of related proposals and show how it addresses criticisms that have previously posed problems for the general embodiment approach.

Abstraction in perceptual symbol systems

After reviewing six senses of abstraction, this article focuses on abstractions that take the form of summary representations. Three central properties of these abstractions are established: (i) type–token interpretation; (ii) structured representation; and (iii) dynamic realization. Traditional theories of representation handle interpretation and structure well but are not sufficiently dynamical. Conversely, connectionist theories are exquisitely dynamic but have problems with structure. Perceptual symbol systems offer an approach that implements all three properties naturally. Within this framework, a loose collection of property and relation simulators develops to represent abstractions. Type–token interpretation results from binding a property simulator to a region of a perceived or simulated category member. Structured representation results from binding a configuration of property and relation simulators to multiple regions in an integrated manner. Dynamic realization results from applying different subsets of property and relation simulators to category members on different occasions. From this standpoint, there are no permanent or complete abstractions of a category in memory. Instead, abstraction is the skill to construct temporary online interpretations of a category's members. Although an infinite number of abstractions are possible, attractors develop for habitual approaches to interpretation. This approach provides new ways of thinking about abstraction phenomena in categorization, inference, background knowledge and learning.