A Metaphorical Analysis of Female Worship in the Kam Epic: Songs of Kam Remote Ancestors

Metaphor is a cognitive mechanism in which people understand an abstract and unfamiliar object by comparing it to a more concrete and familiar one, according to rhetoric, while modern cognitive linguistics holds that metaphor is a cognitive mechanism in which people understand an abstract and unfamiliar object by comparing it to a more concrete and familiar one, according to modern cognitive linguistics. It’s a basic human cognitive and thinking model. Therefore, cognitive metaphor study is devoted to revealing the deep cognitive patterns of language and explaining various cognitive behaviors through languages. Myth is an important vector of human culture and has a profound influence on the formation of national cultural psychology. The Kam’s epic Songs of Kam Remote Ancestors as a narrative ancient song of the Kam covers the longest history of the Kam and has the highest content about the Kam’s ancestors. This epic has many descriptions of woman ancestors and a large number of metaphors of women as well, which reflects the unique position of women in the Kam culture. This study draws on the cognitive metaphor theory to investigate the female metaphors with the purpose of uncovering the development and evolution of the Kam’s woman worship perception in their history by using MIP metaphor identifying method.

Infant imitation in a third-party context

The present study examined 17-month-olds’ imitation in a third-party context. In four experiments, the infants watched while a reliable or an unreliable model demonstrated a novel action with an unfamiliar (Experiments 1 and 3) or a familiar (Experiments 2 and 4) object to another adult. In Experiments 3 and 4, the second adult imitated the model’s novel action. Neither the familiarity of the object or whether or not the second adult copied the model’s behavior influenced the likelihood of infant imitation. Findings showed that the infants in the reliable model condition were more willing to imitate the model’s action with the unfamiliar object. The results suggest that infants take into account the reliability of a model even when the model has not directly demonstrated her reliability to the infant.

Conflicting Nature of Social-Pragmatic Cues with Mutual Exclusivity Regarding Three-Year-Olds’ Label-Referent Mappings

The present research aims at finding to what extent social-pragmatic cues that conflict with mutual exclusivity lead preschoolers to exclude a novel object as a referent for a novel word. Sixty early and late 3-year-old preschoolers randomly participated in one of the three conditions. In the first condition, preschoolers’ tendency to select an unfamiliar object for an unfamiliar word is investigated in the absence of social-pragmatic cues that contradict mutual exclusivity. The second condition is aimed to investigate if partial social-pragmatic cues, such as pointing towards a familiar object, interfere with mutual exclusivity. In the third condition, pointing towards a familiar object is accompanied by gazing alternately between the familiar object and preschoolers to investigate whether preschoolers abandon or still honor mutual exclusivity. The results indicate that in the absence of any social-pragmatic cues, preschoolers use a familiar object as a cue leading them to match a novel object with a novel word. Partial cues such as pointing towards familiar objects do not make any significant difference in preschoolers’ familiar/unfamiliar object selection for an unfamiliar word. If both of the social-pragmatic cues are available, preschoolers suspend mutual exclusivity in indirect word learning situations.

The situational context and the reliability of an adult model influence infants’ imitation

Four studies examined 15- to 16-month-olds’ imitation of a model’s novel action with a familiar or an unfamiliar object. The infants observed a reliable or an unreliable model demonstrating a novel action with the object in a solitary observational (Study 1, 44 infants; Study 3, 40 infants) or in an interactive (Study 2, 48 infants; Study 4, 44 infants) context. The model’s reliability was manipulated by having the model acting competently or incompetently with different familiar objects. In two out of four studies infants imitated the model’s behavior when the model had previously shown to be reliable than when the model had been unreliable. The infants’ motivation to imitate was related to whether the reliable model interacted with the infants during object demonstration. More infants imitated the reliable model, who demonstrated the objects while interacting with the infants, than the reliable model who behaved in a disinterested manner during object demonstration.

One-shot learning and generation of dexterous grasps for novel objects

This paper presents a method for one-shot learning of dexterous grasps and grasp generation for novel objects. A model of each grasp type is learned from a single kinesthetic demonstration and several types are taught. These models are used to select and generate grasps for unfamiliar objects. Both the learning and generation stages use an incomplete point cloud from a depth camera, so no prior model of an object shape is used. The learned model is a product of experts, in which experts are of two types. The first type is a contact model and is a density over the pose of a single hand link relative to the local object surface. The second type is the hand-configuration model and is a density over the whole-hand configuration. Grasp generation for an unfamiliar object optimizes the product of these two model types, generating thousands of grasp candidates in under 30 seconds. The method is robust to incomplete data at both training and testing stages. When several grasp types are considered the method selects the highest-likelihood grasp across all the types. In an experiment, the training set consisted of five different grasps and the test set of 45 previously unseen objects. The success rate of the first-choice grasp is 84.4% or 77.7% if seven views or a single view of the test object are taken, respectively.

The scope and limits of overimitation in the transmission of artefact culture

Children are generally masterful imitators, both rational and flexible in their reproduction of others' actions. After observing an adult operating an unfamiliar object, however, young children will frequently overimitate , reproducing not only the actions that were causally necessary but also those that were clearly superfluous. Why does overimitation occur? We argue that when children observe an adult intentionally acting on a novel object, they may automatically encode all of the adult's actions as causally meaningful. This process of automatic causal encoding (ACE) would generally guide children to accurate beliefs about even highly opaque objects. In situations where some of an adult's intentional actions were unnecessary, however, it would also lead to persistent overimitation. Here, we undertake a thorough examination of the ACE hypothesis, reviewing prior evidence and offering three new experiments to further test the theory. We show that children will persist in overimitating even when doing so is costly (underscoring the involuntary nature of the effect), but also that the effect is constrained by intentionality in a manner consistent with its posited learning function. Overimitation may illuminate not only the structure of children's causal understanding, but also the social learning processes that support our species' artefact-centric culture.

Explaining the disambiguation effect: Don't exclude mutual exclusivity

ABSTRACTWhen they see a familiar object and an unfamiliar one, and are asked to select the referent of a novel label, children usually choose the unfamiliar object. We asked whether this ‘disambiguation effect’ reflects an expectation that each object has just one label (mutual exclusivity), or an expectation about the intent of the speaker who uses a novel label. In Study 1, when a speaker gazed at or pointed toward the familiar object in a novel–familiar pair, children aged 2 ; 6 (N=64) selected that object in response to a neutral request, but were much less likely to do so in response to a label request. In Study 2, when a speaker both gazed at and pointed toward the familiar object, toddlers (N=16) overwhelmingly selected the familiar object in response to a label request. The expectation that each object has just one label can lead children to discount some individual behavioral cues to a speaker's intent, though it can be overridden given a combination of pragmatic cues.