A neuroscientific grasp of concepts: from control to representation (original) (raw)
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Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 2018
The nature of concepts has always been a hotly debated topic in both philosophy and psychology and, more recently, also in cognitive neuroscience. Different accounts have been proposed of what concepts are. These accounts reflect deeply different conceptions of how the human mind works. In the last decades, two diametrically opposed theories of human cognition have been discussed and empirically investigated: the Computational Theory of Mind, on the one hand and Embodied Cognition, on the other hand. The former proposes that concepts are abstract and amodal symbols in the language of thought, while the latter argues for the embodied nature of concepts that are conceived of as grounded in actions and perception. The embodiment of both concrete and abstract concepts has been challenged by many. These challenges will be here taken seriously and addressed from a comparative perspective. We will provide a phylogenetic and neurobiologically inspired account of the embodied nature of both abstract and concrete concepts. We will propose that, although differing in certain respect, they both might have a bodily foundation. Commonalities between abstract and concrete concepts will be explained by recurring to the Peircean notions of icon and abductive inference. According to Peirce, icons are the kind of signs on which abductive inferences rest. It will be claimed that the mechanism of Embodied Simulation can be described as an icon, and it will then be suggested that on these, basic natural signs rest, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, the capacity to conceptualize. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain’.
The brain's concepts: The role of the sensory-motor system in conceptual knowledge
Cognitive neuropsychology, 2005
Concepts are the elementary units of reason and linguistic meaning. They are conventional and relatively stable. As such, they must somehow be the result of neural activity in the brain. The questions are: Where? and How? A common philosophical position is that all concepts-even concepts about action and perception-are symbolic and abstract, and therefore must be implemented outside the brain's sensory-motor system. We will argue against this position using (1) neuroscientific evidence; (2) results from neural computation; and (3) results about the nature of concepts from cognitive linguistics. We will propose that the sensory-motor system has the right kind of structure to characterise both sensory-motor and more abstract concepts. Central to this picture are the neural theory of language and the theory of cogs, according to which, brain structures in the sensory-motor regions are exploited to characterise the so-called "abstract" concepts that constitute the meanings of grammatical constructions and general inference patterns.
Concepts as Building Blocks of Information and The Structure of Consciousness
2022
We show that information, in contrast to the common belief, is not contained in a signal external to consciousness, but is a product of consciousness itself and is a set of concepts. The external signal serves as a trigger for the response of the nervous system. The response is subsequently analyzed by consciousness for its conceptual content. Information is a result of this analysis and can be considered a vector of concepts, i.e. conceptogram, of a signal for a specific consciousness at a specific moment. A concept is a sensory and visual image of a certain biochemical profile of the human nervous system, which is created and developed throughout one"s lifetime. It is an elementary building block of both human consciousness and information. In particular, "I" ("self") is one of the concepts. The creation of a particular concept is a phase transition. The Concept Module, or ability to generate concepts, is unique to humans. We offer scenarios for how this ability could have been acquired by our predecessors. It is suggested that the animal's brain, being a processor of visual signals that converts them into internal images, has developed this ability as a result of "guessing" or imagining details that are missing in the actual visible picture. We will also discuss some other issues related to consciousness that may be of interest to both Human and Artificial Intelligence research. Introduction: Concepts. Looking at an oak, birch, pine or willow, an animal does not try to understand what is common between them. It does not decide to call them all trees and does not look for what could be other trees. Humans do. You may correctly point out that, firstly, it is because animals do not have language. Secondly, they do not analyze, systemize, extract common properties, or look for reasons and explanation. But why do we do that while they do not? When did it start? Below, I hope I will answer these and some other questions.
Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences, 2004
Non-human primates produce a diverse repertoire of speciesspecific calls and have rich conceptual systems. Some of their calls are designed to convey information about concepts such as predators, food, and social relationships, as well as the affective state of the caller. Little is known about the neural architecture of these calls, and much of what we do know is based on single-cell physiology from anesthetized subjects. By using positron emission tomography in awake rhesus macaques, we found that conspecific vocalizations elicited activity in higher-order visual areas, including regions in the temporal lobe associated with the visual perception of object form (TE͞TEO) and motion (superior temporal sulcus) and storing visual object information into long-term memory (TE), as well as in limbic (the amygdala and hippocampus) and paralimbic regions (ventromedial prefrontal cortex) associated with the interpretation and memory-encoding of highly salient and affective material. This neural circuitry strongly corresponds to the network shown to support representation of conspecifics and affective information in humans. These findings shed light on the evolutionary precursors of conceptual representation in humans, suggesting that monkeys and humans have a common neural substrate for representing object concepts.
The brain's concepts: The role of the sensory-motor system in reason and language
Concepts are the elementary units of reason and linguistic meaning. They are conventional and relatively stable. As such, they must somehow be the result of neural activity in the brain. The questions are: Where? and How? A common philosophical position is that all concepts-even concepts about action and perception-are symbolic and abstract, and therefore must be implemented outside the brain's sensory-motor system. We will argue against this position using (1) neuroscientific evidence; (2) results from neural computation; and (3) results about the nature of concepts from cognitive linguistics. We will propose that the sensory-motor system has the right kind of structure to characterise both sensory-motor and more abstract concepts. Central to this picture are the neural theory of language and the theory of cogs, according to which, brain structures in the sensory-motor regions are exploited to characterise the so-called "abstract" concepts that constitute the meanings of grammatical constructions and general inference patterns.
Section of Cognitive Neuroscience (editor Stefano Cappa). Elsevier Embodiment theories
2020
Embodied cognition (EC) views propose that cognition is shaped by the kind of body organisms possess. We overview recent literature on EC, highlighting the differences between stronger and weaker versions of the theory. We also illustrate the debates on the notions of simulation, of representation, and on the role of the motor system for cognition, and we address some of the most important research topics. Future challenges concern the understanding of how abstract concepts and words are represented, and the relationship between EC and other promising approaches, the distributional views of meaning and the extended mind views. Definition of Embodied Cognition Embodied cognition theory (EC) is intended as a response to the increasing dominance of the classic representational and computational theories of mind (RCTM) in cognitive science. Despite many versions of embodied theories, there are however at least two commonalities between all EC approaches. The first is the view that cogni...
Cognitive Science, 2000
Studies of the conceptual abilities of nonhuman primates demonstrate the substantial range of these abilities as well as their limitations. Such abilities range from categorization on the basis of shared physical attributes, associative relations and functions to abstract concepts as reflected in analogical reasoning about relations between relations. The pattern of results from these studies point to a fundamental distinction between monkeys and apes in both their implicit and explicit conceptual capacities. Monkeys, but not apes, might be best regarded as "paleo-logicans" in the sense that they form common class concepts of identity on the basis of identical predicates (i.e., shared features). The discrimination of presumably more abstract relations commonly involves relatively simple procedural strategies mediated by associative processes likely shared by all mammals. There is no evidence that monkeys can perceive, let alone judge, relations-between-relations. This analogical conceptual capacity is found only in chimpanzees and humans. Interestingly, the "analogical ape," like the child, can make its analogical knowledge explicit only if it is first provided with a symbol system by which propositional representations can be encoded and manipulated