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Language and Thought - How do people think about things they can never see or touch?
How do people mentally represent and reason about abstract concepts like time, value, or intelligence? My research explores a potential answer: perhaps the mind recruits old structures for new uses. Perhaps perceptuo-motor representations that result from physical interactions with the world are recycled to form mental representations in abstract domains.
This hypothesis is motivated, in part, by patterns in language: people often talk about abstract things using metaphors from more concrete or perceptually rich domains (e.g., a long time, a high price, a deep mystery). But do people really think about abstract concepts metaphorically? Although linguistic evidence for 'conceptual metaphors' is abundant, the necessary non-linguistic evidence has been elusive.
My research has developed new experimental tools to evaluate metaphor theory as an account of the acquisition and structure of abstract concepts. Studies using low-level psychophysical tasks provide some of the first non-linguistic evidence for metaphorical mental representations. More...
Culture and Cognition - Can cross-cultural variation reveal cognitive universals?
Cultural experience, in addition to perceptuo-motor and linguistic experience, contributes to the creation of knowledge, and cross-cultural differences can demonstrate the diversity of the human conceptual repertoire. Yet, to the extent that our concepts depend on our cultural conventions and artifacts, these same cross-cultural differences can also provide powerful evidence for universal processes of knowledge construction. More...
Mind and Body - What is the role of bodily experience in structuring the mind?
To what extent are concepts internalizations of perceptuo-motor interactions with the environment? My research addresses two related questions: how do mental simulations of physical experiences contribute to the instantiation of concepts online, and how does perceptuo-motor experience contribute to conceptual development? More...
Web Links
http://www.mpi.nl/people/casasanto-daniel
http://www.casasanto.com/Site/home.html
Publications
http://www.mpi.nl/people/casasanto-daniel/publications
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