Visual search studies have shown that East Asians rely more on information gathered through their extrafoveal (i.e., peripheral) vision than do Western Caucasians, who tend to rely more on information gathered using their foveal (i.e., central) vision. However, the reasons for this remain unclear. Cognitive linguists suggest that the difference is attributable linguistic variation, while cultural psychologists contend it is due to cultural factors. The current study used eye-tracking data collected during a visual search task to compare these explanations by (...) leveraging a semantic difference against a cultural difference to determine which view best explained strategies used on the task. The task was administered to Chinese, American, and Japanese participants with a primary focus on the Chinese participants’ behaviors since the semantic difference aligned the Chinese participants with the Americans, while their cultural affiliation aligned them with the Japanese participants. The results indicated that the Chinese group aligned more closely with the American group on most measures, suggesting that semantic differences were more important than cultural affiliation on this particular task. However, there were some results that could not be accounted for by the semantic differences, suggesting that linguistic and cultural factors might affect visual search strategies concurrently. (shrink)

Behavioral genetics and cultural evolution have both revolutionized our understanding of human behavior – largely independent of each other. Here, we reconcile these two fields under a dual inheritance framework, offering a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between genes and culture. Going beyond typical analyses of gene–environment interactions, we describe the cultural dynamics that shape these interactions by shaping the environment and population structure. A cultural evolutionary approach can explain, for example, how factors such as rates of innovation and (...) diffusion, density of cultural subgroups, and tolerance for behavioral diversity impact heritability estimates, thus yielding predictions for different social contexts. Moreover, when cumulative culture functionally overlaps with genes, genetic effects become masked, unmasked, or even reversed, and the causal effects of an identified gene become confounded with features of the cultural environment. The manner of confounding is specific to a particular society at a particular time, but a WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) sampling problem obscures this boundedness. Cultural evolutionary dynamics are typically missing from models of gene-to-phenotype causality, hindering generalizability of genetic effects across societies and across time. We lay out a reconciled framework and use it to predict the ways in which heritability should differ between societies, between socioeconomic levels, and other groupings within some societies but not others, and over the life course. An integrated cultural evolutionary behavioral genetic approach cuts through the nature–nurture debate and helps resolve controversies in topics such as IQ. (shrink)

Previous research on linguistic relativity and economic decisions hypothesized that speakers of languages with obligatory tense marking of future time reference (FTR) should value future rewards less than speakers of languages which permit present tense FTR. This was hypothesized on the basis of obligatory linguistic marking (e.g., will) causing speakers to construe future events as more temporally distal and thereby to exhibit increased “temporal discounting”: the subjective devaluation of outcomes as the delay until they will occur increases. However, several aspects (...) of this hypothesis are incomplete. First, it overlooks the role of “modal” FTR structures which encode notions about the likelihood of future outcomes (e.g., might). This may influence “probability discounting”: the subjective devaluation of outcomes as the probability of their occurrence decreases. Second, the extent to which linguistic structures are subjectively related to temporal or probability discounting differences is currently unknown. To address these, we elicited FTR language and subjective ratings of temporal distance and probability from speakers of English, which exhibits strongly grammaticized FTR, and Dutch, which does not. Several findings went against the predictions of the previous hypothesis: Framing an FTR statement in the present (“Ellie arrives later on”) versus the future tense (“…will arrive…”) did not affect ratings of temporal distance; English speakers rated future statements as relatively more temporally proximal than Dutch speakers; and English and Dutch speakers rated future tenses as encoding high certainty, which suggests that obligatory future tense marking might result in less discounting. Additionally, compared with Dutch speakers, English speakers used more low-certainty terms in general (e.g., may) and as a function of various experimental factors. We conclude that the prior cross-linguistic observations of the link between FTR and psychological discounting may be caused by the connection between low-certainty modal structures and probability discounting, rather than future tense and temporality. (shrink)

A long-standing question in cognitive science is how high-level knowledge is integrated with sensory input. For example, listeners can leverage lexical knowledge to interpret an ambiguous speech sound, but do such effects reflect direct top-down influences on perception or merely postperceptual biases? A critical test case in the domain of spoken word recognition is lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation (LCfC). Previous LCfC studies have shown that a lexically restored context phoneme (e.g., /s/ in Christma#) can alter the perceived place of (...) articulation of a subsequent target phoneme (e.g., the initial phoneme of a stimulus from a tapes-capes continuum), consistent with the influence of an unambiguous context phoneme in the same position. Because this phoneme-to-phoneme compensation for coarticulation is considered sublexical, scientists agree that evidence for LCfC would constitute strong support for top–down interaction. However, results from previous LCfC studies have been inconsistent, and positive effects have often been small. Here, we conducted extensive piloting of stimuli prior to testing for LCfC. Specifically, we ensured that context items elicited robust phoneme restoration (e.g., that the final phoneme of Christma# was reliably identified as /s/) and that unambiguous context-final segments (e.g., a clear /s/ at the end of Christmas) drove reliable compensation for coarticulation for a subsequent target phoneme. We observed robust LCfC in a well-powered, preregistered experiment with these pretested items (N = 40) as well as in a direct replication study (N = 40). These results provide strong evidence in favor of computational models of spoken word recognition that include top–down feedback. (shrink)

According to the popular Grounded Cognition Model (GCM), the sensory and motor features of concepts, including word meanings, are stored directly within neural systems for perception and action. More precisely, the core claim is that these concrete conceptual features reuse some of the same modality-specific representations that serve to categorize experiences involving the relevant kinds of objects and events. Research in semantic typology, however, has shown that word meanings vary significantly across the roughly 6500 languages in the world. I argue (...) that this crosslinguistic semantic diversity has significant yet previously unrecognized theoretical consequences for the GCM. In particular, to accommodate the typological data, the GCM must assume that the concrete features of word meanings are not merely stored within sensory/motor brain systems, but are represented there in ways that are, to a nontrivial degree, language-specific. Moreover, it must assume that these conceptual representations are also activated during the nonlinguistic processing of the relevant kinds of objects and events (e.g., during visual perception and action planning); otherwise, they would not really be grounded, which is to say, embedded inside sensory/motor systems. Crucially, however, such activations would constitute what is traditionally called linguistic relativity—that is, the influence of language-specific semantic structures on other forms of cognition. The overarching aim of this paper is to elaborate this argument more fully and explore its repercussions. To that end, I discuss in greater detail the key aspects of the GCM, the evidence for crosslinguistic semantic diversity, pertinent work on linguistic relativity, the central claim that the GCM entails linguistic relativity, some initial supporting results, and some important limitations and future directions. (shrink)

According to the popular Grounded Cognition Model (GCM), the sensory and motor features of concepts, including word meanings, are stored directly within neural systems for perception and action. More precisely, the core claim is that these concrete conceptual features reuse some of the same modality-specific representations that serve to categorize experiences involving the relevant kinds of objects and events. Research in semantic typology, however, has shown that word meanings vary significantly across the roughly 6500 languages in the world. I argue (...) that this crosslinguistic semantic diversity has significant yet previously unrecognized theoretical consequences for the GCM. In particular, to accommodate the typological data, the GCM must assume that the concrete features of word meanings are not merely stored within sensory/motor brain systems, but are represented there in ways that are, to a nontrivial degree, language-specific. Moreover, it must assume that these conceptual representations are also activated during the nonlinguistic processing of the relevant kinds of objects and events (e.g., during visual perception and action planning); otherwise, they would not really be grounded, which is to say, embedded inside sensory/motor systems. Crucially, however, such activations would constitute what is traditionally called linguistic relativity—that is, the influence of language-specific semantic structures on other forms of cognition. The overarching aim of this paper is to elaborate this argument more fully and explore its repercussions. To that end, I discuss in greater detail the key aspects of the GCM, the evidence for crosslinguistic semantic diversity, pertinent work on linguistic relativity, the central claim that the GCM entails linguistic relativity, some initial supporting results, and some important limitations and future directions. (shrink)

According to the popular Grounded Cognition Model (GCM), the sensory and motor features of concepts, including word meanings, are stored directly within neural systems for perception and action. More precisely, the core claim is that these concrete conceptual features reuse some of the same modality-specific representations that serve to categorize experiences involving the relevant kinds of objects and events. Research in semantic typology, however, has shown that word meanings vary significantly across the roughly 6500 languages in the world. I argue (...) that this crosslinguistic semantic diversity has significant yet previously unrecognized theoretical consequences for the GCM. In particular, to accommodate the typological data, the GCM must assume that the concrete features of word meanings are not merely stored within sensory/motor brain systems, but are represented there in ways that are, to a nontrivial degree, language-specific. Moreover, it must assume that these conceptual representations are also activated during the nonlinguistic processing of the relevant kinds of objects and events (e.g., during visual perception and action planning); otherwise, they would not really be grounded, which is to say, embedded inside sensory/motor systems. Crucially, however, such activations would constitute what is traditionally called linguistic relativity—that is, the influence of language-specific semantic structures on other forms of cognition. The overarching aim of this paper is to elaborate this argument more fully and explore its repercussions. To that end, I discuss in greater detail the key aspects of the GCM, the evidence for crosslinguistic semantic diversity, pertinent work on linguistic relativity, the central claim that the GCM entails linguistic relativity, some initial supporting results, and some important limitations and future directions. (shrink)

We explore different ways in which the human visual system can adapt for perceiving and categorizing the environment. There are various accounts of supervised (categorical) and unsupervised perceptual learning, and different perspectives on the functional relationship between perception and categorization. We suggest that common experimental designs are insufficient to differentiate between hypothesized perceptual learning mechanisms and reveal their possible interplay. We propose a relatively underutilized way of studying potential categorical effects on perception, and we test the predictions of different perceptual (...) learning models using a two‐dimensional, interleaved categorization‐plus‐reconstruction task. We find evidence that the human visual system adapts its encodings to the feature structure of the environment, uses categorical expectations for robust reconstruction, allocates encoding resources with respect to categorization utility, and adapts to prevent miscategorizations. (shrink)

Reading numbers aloud involves visual processes that analyze the digit string and verbal processes that produce the number words. Cognitive models of number reading assume that information flows from the visual input to the verbal production processes—a feed‐forward processing mode in which the verbal production depends on the visual input but not vice versa. Here, I show that information flows also in the opposite direction, from verbal production to the visual input processes. Participants read aloud briefly presented multi‐digit strings in (...) Hebrew, in which the order of words is congruent with the order of digits (21 = twenty‐and‐one), and in Arabic, in which the ones word precedes the tens word (one‐and‐twenty). The error‐by‐digit‐position curve was affected by language: relative to Hebrew, in Arabic the error rate was slightly lower for the unit digit and slightly higher for the decade digit, indicating that in Arabic the unit digit was processed earlier and the decade digit later, in accord with the Arabic word order. This language‐dependent processing order originated in the visual level and was not a verbal confound, because it persisted even when I controlled for the serial position of the decade/unit word in the verbal number by using numbers with 0 (two hundred three/two hundred thirty). I conclude that the visual analyzer's digit scanning order, decade‐first or unit‐first, is not fixed but affected by the language in which the number is produced—a top‐down, verbal‐to‐visual information flow. (shrink)

How does the language we speak affect our perception? Here, we argue for linguistic relativity and present an explanation through “language-induced automatized stimulus-driven attention” : Our respective mother tongue automatically influences our attention and, hence, perception, and in this sense determines what we see. As LASA is highly practiced throughout life, it is difficult to suppress, and even shows in language-independent non-linguistic tasks. We argue that attention is involved in language-dependent processing and point out that automatic or stimulus-driven forms of (...) attention, albeit initially learned as serving a linguistic skill, account for linguistic relativity as they are automatized and generalize to non-linguistic tasks. In support of this possibility, we review evidence for such automatized stimulus-driven attention in language-independent non-linguistic tasks. We conclude that linguistic relativity is possible and in fact a reality, although it might not be as powerful as assumed by some of its strongest proponents. (shrink)