Category Archives: Language & Cognition

3D movies of brains

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From MIT News. With video.

Caenorhabditis_elegans

Caenorhabditis elegans. Wikimedia Commons

http://www.hhmi.org/research/zebrafish-systems-neuroscience-whole-brain-analysis-neural-circuits-underlying-learned

Larval zebrafish. Source: Howard Hughes Medical Institute

“Researchers at MIT and the University of Vienna have created an imaging system that reveals neural activity throughout the brains of living animals. This technique, the first that can generate 3-D movies of entire brains at the millisecond timescale, could help scientists discover how neuronal networks process sensory information and generate behavior. The team used the new system to simultaneously image the activity of every neuron in the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, as well as the entire brain of a zebrafish larva, offering a more complete picture of nervous system activity than has been previously possible.”

Robert Prevedel et al., Simultaneous whole-animal 3D imaging of neuronal activity using light-field microscopy. Nature Methods, 18 May 2014.

Connections: We now have the means to connect neuronal activity to behavior in a worm and in a fish. That’s exciting, but it isn’t the end of the story. Fortunately, there are a couple of passages in the recent NIH BRAIN Initiative Report that emphasize that efforts to understand the brain can’t be limited to finding the links between neuronal activity and observable behavior. “In advanced organisms our concept of ‘behavior’ must be extended to include sophisticated internal cognitive processes in addition to externally observable actions” … “Mental life can flourish within the nervous system, even if the behavioral link to the observable world is tenuous. Thus the BRAIN Initiative should focus on internal cognitive processes and mental states in addition to overt behavior.” Unfortunately, research on language and the brain doesn’t seem to be on the agenda for the NIH BRAIN initiative. That’s a big oversight, if not an outright blunder – there is probably no cognitive domain that we collectively know more about at an abstract, computational, level. There is no better window into the human mind than language, and it’s already wide open. The Max Planck Society must have seen the potential and importance of ongoing brain research on language when electing Angela Friederici as their new vice-president.  There is also an NSF report about a recent workshop on Linking Language and Cognition to Neuroscience via Computation. 

Connections: The neural code that makes us human.

Dictionary of Untranslatables: a Philosophical Lexicon

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untranslatable

Dictionary of Untranslatables: a Philosophical Lexicon
Source: Publisher

Dictionary of Untranslatables

“This is an encyclopedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms and concepts that defy easy–or any–translation from one language and culture to another. … The entries, written by more than 150 distinguished scholars, describe the origins and meanings of each term, the history and context of its usage, its translations into other languages, and its use in notable texts. The dictionary also includes essays on the special characteristics of particular languages–English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.”

Connections: Quine’s thesis of the Indeterminacy of Translation, via the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

What could be more interesting than how the mind works?

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From the Harvard Gazette, 06 May 2014

Source: Stephanie Mitchell. Harvard Gazette, May 6, 2014

Source: Stephanie Mitchell. Harvard Gazette

“I don’t think of what I’m teaching my students as “psychology.” I think of it as teaching them “how the mind works.” They’re not the same thing. Psychology is an academic guild, and I could certainly spend a lot of time talking about schools of psychology, the history of psychology, methods in psychology, theories in psychology, and so on. But that would be about my clique, how my buddies and I spend our days, how I earn my paycheck, what peer group I want to impress. What students are interested in is not an academic field but a set of phenomena in the world — in this case the workings of the human mind. Sometimes academics seem not to appreciate the difference.”

The Grammar of individuation and counting

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Suzi Oliveira de Lima: The grammar of individuation and counting. 2014 UMass dissertation.

suzi

Suzi Oliveira de Lima: From personal website

Are there languages that do not draw a grammatical distinction between count nouns and mass nouns? Some scholars have said there aren’t. Others have claimed that there are languages where all non-referential nouns are mass nouns. Henry Davis and Lisa Matthewson (1999) argued that in the Salish language St’át’imcets, all non-referential nouns are count nouns. Suzi Lima has been investigating another language with this property: the Tupi language Yudja (Juruna family). Lima’s dissertation is a game changer in fieldwork methodology: her findings do not just rely on the by now standard elicitation tasks for semantic fieldwork, but use a wider range of experimental techniques, including quantity judgment tasks and production and comprehension studies with children and adults.

Related work from SULA 8: Andrea Wilhelm made a case that in Dëne S??iné (Chipewyan) all nouns are referential. Nouns either denote individuals or kinds, they do not have predicative denotations at all. Amy Rose Deal suggested that in Nez Perce (Niimiipuutímt, Sahaptian), all notional mass nouns can have both count and mass denotations. What is emerging from this cross-linguistic work, then, is that languages have options for construing noun denotations. The possible options seem to be: reference to individuals, reference to kinds, singular, plural, or number-neutral atomic properties, and non-atomic properties. There are repercussions of whatever option is chosen by a language. A language that has no mass nouns should not have measure phrases, for example, and this is so for Yudja, as Lima shows. A language where all nouns are referential should not have intersective adjectives or restrictive relative clauses, and this is so for Dëne S??iné, as Wilhelm shows.  

Most recent work on the count-mass distinction in natural languages responds in one way or other to Gennaro Chierchia’s influential Reference to Kinds Across Languages, which is one of the most downloaded papers for Natural Language Semantics. With over 1400 citations, it is also one of the most cited papers in semantics. 

You don’t always know what you are saying

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Top picks from from Nature News, 02 May 2014

Source: http://brainstormpsychology.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-stroop-effect.html

Source: Brainstorm Psychology

“In Lind’s experiment, participants took a Stroop test — in which a person is shown, for example, the word ‘red’ printed in blue and is asked to name the colour of the type (in this case, blue). During the test, participants heard their responses through headphones. The responses were recorded so that Lind could occasionally play back the wrong word, giving participants auditory feedback of their own voice saying something different from what they had just said.” … ” After participants heard a manipulated word, a question popped up on the screen asking what they had just said, and they were also quizzed after the test to see whether they had detected the switch. When the voice-activated software got the timing just right — so that the wrong word began within 5–20 milliseconds of the participant starting to speak — the change went undetected more than two-thirds of the time.”  The original article appeared in Psychological Science, April 28, 2014.

Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other’s minds

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Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other’s minds. TED talk. More than 2 million views. 

Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/ape-teaches.html

Rebecca Saxe. Source: PBS

“Above and slightly behind your right ear, exists a part of your brain many scientists believe is specifically dedicated to thinking about other people’s thoughts – to predicting them, reading them, and empathizing with them. It’s called the temporoparietal junction, and this is the area cognitive neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe focuses on in her research.”

Q & A: Rebecca Saxe. From the MIT Technology Review. “To me, the signature of human social cognition is the same thing that makes good old-fashioned AI hard, which is its generativity. We can recognize and think about and reason through a literally infinite set of situations and goals and human minds. And yet we have a very particular and finite machinery to do that. So what are the right ingredients? If we know what those are, then we can try to understand how the combinations of those ingredients generate this massively productive, infinitely generalizable human capacity.”

Odors are expressible in language

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Asifa Majid & Niclas Burenhult: Odors are expressible in language, as long as you speak the right language. Cognition 130(2), 2014.

Source: http://www.ru.nl/@838583/pagina/

Asifa Majid. Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen

“From Plato to Pinker there has been the common belief that the experience of a smell is impossible to put into words. Decades of studies have confirmed this observation. But the studies to date have focused on participants from urbanized Western societies. Cross-cultural research suggests that there may be other cultures where odors play a larger role. The Jahai of the Malay Peninsula are one such group. … Our findings show that the long-held assumption that people are bad at naming smells is not universally true. Odors are expressible in language, as long as you speak the right language.”

Also: Ewelina Wnuk & Asifa Majid: Revisiting the limits of language: The odor lexicon of Maniq. Cognition 131 (1), 2014.

Individuals with episodic amnesia are not stuck in time

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Carl F. Craver, Donna Kwan, Chloe Steindam, R. Shayna Rosenbaum: Individuals with episodic amnesia are not stuck in time. Neuropsychologia 57, May 2014, Pages 191 -195.

“The idea that episodic memory is required for temporal consciousness is common in science, philosophy, fiction, and everyday life. Related ideas follow naturally: that individuals with episodic amnesia are lost mariners, stuck in time, in a “permanent present tense” or “lost in a non-time, a sort of instantaneous present”. Yet recent evidence suggests that people with episodic amnesia are not stuck in time. Episodic memory and future thought are dissociable from semantic knowledge of time, attitudes about time, and consideration of future consequences in decision-making. These findings illustrate how little is known about the sense of time in episodic amnesia and suggest that the human sense of time is likely not one thing, but many things.” 

Is the man who is tall happy?

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http://www.firstshowing.net/2013/watch-first-trailer-for-michel-gondrys-noam-chomsky-documentary/

Source: firstshowing.net

“My conversations with Professor Chomsky were lively, sometime complex, always very human. Through my illustrations, we follow the winding path of my halting and incomplete understanding. Noam is often patient, sometime less so. The trail always follows unexpected bends. The process and logic of Noam’s stream of ideas have determined the transitions and evolution of my drawings. The concept of ‘animated documentary’ finds a perfect justification here.”

Michel Gondry: Is the man who is tall happy?

The long reach of reason

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Steven Pinker & Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: The long reach of reason. Video.

Source: Ted Blog

Source: TED Blog

“Here’s a TED first: an animated Socratic dialog! In a time when irrationality seems to rule both politics and culture, has reasoned thinking finally lost its power? Watch as psychologist Steven Pinker is gradually, brilliantly persuaded by philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein that reason is actually the key driver of human moral progress, even if its effect sometimes takes generations to unfold. The dialog was recorded live at TED, and animated, in incredible, often hilarious, detail by Cognitive.”