Material Anchors for Conceptual Blends

60 Pages·2008·1.04 MB·English

by  Edwin Hutchins

Material Anchors
for Conceptual Blends
SS Cognition
Edwin Hutchins
Department of Cognitive Science
University of California San Diego
Handling Conceptual Blends
• Selectively projecting structure from inputs
to the blended space
(cid:129) Completing the projected structure - making
inferences
(cid:129) Elaboration or “running the blend” -
cognitive work performed within the blend.
The Need for Stable Conceptual
Representations
(cid:129) D’Andrade, (1989) Culturally Based Reasoning
and the Wason (1966) 4-card task.
(cid:129) All labels manufactured at Pica’s custom label factory
have a letter on one side and a number on the other. If a
label has a vowel on one side, it must have an even number
on the other. Which of the labels would you have to turn
over to be sure the rule had not been violated?
A K 2 3
Culturally Arbitrary Relations
(cid:129) If x is true, then y is true (premise)
(cid:129) y is not true (observation)
(cid:129) ?? (conclusion) X is not true.
(cid:129) If Roger is a Bavarian, then John is tall.
(cid:129) John is not tall.
(cid:129) ?? (conclusion) Roger is not a Bavarian.
Culturally Meaningful Relations
(cid:129) If this rock is a garnet, then it is a semi-
precious stone.
(cid:129) This is not a semi-precious stone.
(cid:129) ?? (conclusion)
This is not a garnet.
(cid:129) Reasoning types:
∴
– m. ponens (P ⇒ Q, P Q)
¬ ∴ ¬
– m. tollens (P ⇒ Q, Q P )
(cid:129) m. tollens is easy with culturally familiar
premises, difficult with arbitrary premises.
D’Andrade’s Hypothesis
(cid:129) m. tollens requires manipulation of the
representation of the premises (two shifts in
perspective).
(cid:129) Representations of culturally familiar
premises are more stable, less vulnerable to
deformation, than arbitrary premises.
(cid:129) Stability during processing.
Sources of stability for
conceptual structure
[1]
(cid:129) Cultural conceptual models
– shared (constrained by the behavior of, and
need to coordinate with, other actors)
– systematic (constrained by, perhaps over-
determined by relations to other models)
(cid:129) Material Anchors for Conceptual Blends
– the structure of a physical object or event is one
of the input spaces to the blend.
Fictive Motion
(cid:129) “The aisle runs from the stage to the door.”
(cid:129) A blend of:
– a trajector moving between reference points
– a static scene containing objects
(cid:129) The blend creates topo logical correspondences
between the path of the trajector and spatial
features of the objects.
(cid:129) It may even structure the temporal organization of
the application of attention to the objects[2]
If we are seeing the room containing stage, door, and
aisle, are these sentences processed identically?
(cid:129) The aisle runs from the stage to the door.
(cid:129) The aisle runs from the door to the stage.
Room
Trajector
stage aisle door
aisle
stage runs door