Friday, March 4, 2016, 4:00 pm, Reed 108
Lecturer: Brenda Rapp, Cognitive Science Program, John Hopkins University
A major source of our knowledge about the world comes from our sensory and motor interactions with it. Given this, it is perhaps not surprising that it has been long debated whether human knowledge consists solely of the sensory and motor brain states encoded during previous experiences (the embodied cognition viewpoint) or whether it also includes abstract representations that cannot be reduced to prior sensory-motor memories (the abstractionist viewpoint). Against this backdrop, I will discuss neuroimaging and behavioral experiments directed at identifying the nature of the multiple representations involved in visual letter identification. I will discuss evidence and arguments indicating that we have abstract visual representations of letters as well as abstract amodal ones. In the course of doing so, I will discuss various questions, including: What makes a representation a visual representation? What does it mean for a representation to be abstract? Finally, I will consider the implications of the findings I describe for the debate regarding embodied cognition and abstractionism.
This event is free and open to the public!