Assigned Thursday, February 22th Here are some types of prototypes and prototype effects, and the forms of reasoning
with which they are usually associated: typical case automatic inferences about common cases ideal case comparison with a conceptual standard paragon/anti-paragon exemplar positive/negative role model cognitive reference point estimates; landmark in semantic space salient example (skewed) probability judgments social stereotype snap judgments (challengeable) central case (in a radial category) basis for category extensions graded category membership linear scale reasoning essence
(necessary/sufficient conditions for category membership) causal reasoning explaining natural behavior Pick ONE category from this list: condiment, engineering, pet
The illustration above is from a paper by Melissa
Bowerman and Soonja Choi, titled Space under Construction:
Language-Specific Spatial Categorization in First Language
Acquisition. In it you see several actions, most of which are
encoded by the English words "put in" or "put on". In particular, you
see depictions of:
Your task will be to find out how these actions are encoded in another
language. After finding a language consultant fluent in a non-English
language, ask him or her to translate these sentences with the help of
the illustration. (The language should be one that you
are not fluent in yourself, although it is permissible for you to have
some familiarity with it.)
Either you or your language consultant must
write down the translations, and you must create a gloss for each translation. A
gloss is a word-for-word annotation of the sentence. (You
may have to select Unicode UTF-8 encoding on your browser to view the
below correctly.)
Unglossable elements maybe left untranslated. After completing the
glosses, boldface the non-English verbs and underline the
non-English spatial terms. For example: Then answer these questions: A series of behavioral and imaging experiments that studied
category-specific impairments to semantic memory in patients with
brain lesions, suggest that different parts of the brain are involved
in encoding, for example, animate versus inanimate objects. And
indeed, Martin et al. demonstrated that some different regions of
the normal brain are associated with animals versus tools, using
the imaging technique known as positron emission tomography (PET)
(Martin et al., 1996).
Subjects were asked to identify animals and tools while they
undergo PET scans. While some areas of the brain were active in
both tasks, naming animals selectively activated the left medial
occipital lobe, and naming tools selectively activated the left
premotor area and the left middle temporal gyrus. (The left medial
occipital lobe is traditionally associated with visual processing,
whereas the premotor area is traditionally associated with making
movements, the temporal gyrus with generating action words.)
Now, we would like to repeat the PET experiment using fMRI.
Here is the design of our experiment:. We would first like to
find further evidence for the use of different brain regions for
processing animals and tools. Our hypothesis is that certain regions
of the brain will be selectively activated for animals and certain
others for tools.
The stimuli consist of 18 photographs and can be evenly divided into three
categories: nonsense objects, animals, and tools.
Each subject is presented with the sequence of 18 stimuli in
random order, and is asked to name each stimulus silently. Each
stimulus is presented for 100ms, followed by a centrally located
fixation cross for 500ms. An fMRI image is taken 100ms after the
stimulus is presented. Each subject is told that he will be asked
questions about the pictures at the end of the fMRI session to help
make sure he pays attention during the experiment.
At the end of the experiment, for each subject, we will compare the
fMRI images across different stimuli. We will do three kinds of
comparisons:
More questions:Assignment
4: Prototypes, Spatial Categorization and Psycholinguistics Experiments
Due Thursday, March 1, in class --
please turn in paper write-up. Electronic submission on bSpace is okay for
late submissions. Problem 2 will require that you find a language informant.
Please start early.
Problem 1: PROTOTYPES
Problem 2: SPATIAL CATEGORIZATION
Bǎ bēizi fàng zài zhūo shàng. (Mandarin)
BA cup put at table top
Put the cup on the table.
Bǎ bēizi fàng zài zhūo shàng.
BA cup put at table top
Put the cup on the table.
Problem 3: fMRI study