Anna Borghi | |
---|---|
Citizenship | Italian |
Occupation | Associate Professor of Psychology |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Bologna |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Sapienza University of Rome |
Anna M. Borghi is a cognitive psychologist known for her work on embodied cognition and embodied language comprehension. [1] She is Associate Professor of Psychology at the Sapienza University of Rome and an associate researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technology, [1] Italian Research Council. [2] Borghi serves as Specialty Chief Editor of Frontiers in Psychology (area:Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology). [3]
Borghi received her Laurea in Philosophy in 1987 and her PhD in Experimental Psychology in 1997 from the University of Bologna. [4] Her dissertation was titled Struttura e funzione nella concettualizzazione:il ruolo della percezione,del linguaggio e della conoscenza [Structure and function in categorization:the role of perception,language and knowledge]. Much of Borghi's early work was focused on how conceptual categories are structured, [5] [6] with her later work centering around embodied cognition. [7]
After her PhD work,she completed a post doctorate fellowship and collaborated with Laurence Barsalou at Emory University,and subsequently with Arthur Glenberg at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. [4] The collaboration with Glenberg resulted in well cited paper "Putting Words in Perspective",where the authors presented evidence that there was a link between conceptual knowledge and action. [8]
Borghi's research investigates how language and concepts are grounded in bodily states and motor systems. [9] Specifically,Borghi has focused on the role that affordance perception has in language comprehension [10] and conceptualization. [11] [8] Borghi has also explored how affordances are more generally processed by the human visual system,and has argued that affordances should be understood as sensorimotor representations of possible actions one can take towards an object. [12] [13]
Borghi and her collaborators are responsible for the Words as Social Tools hypothesis, [14] which claims that language serves as a tool to develop abstract concepts. This hypothesis emphasizes the social nature of concepts and argues for specific neural correlates for abstract concepts,such as areas associated with social cognition and motor areas representing the mouth. [15] The Words as Social Tools hypothesis has received praise from some researchers for recognizing the role of language in cognition [16] and the social role of abstract concepts, [17] but has received criticism for some specific components of the theory,such as the role of mouth motor representations, [18] and the underutilization of the mirror neuron system. [19]
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes with input from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science/artificial intelligence, and anthropology. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Cognitive scientists study intelligence and behavior, with a focus on how nervous systems represent, process, and transform information. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
Cognition is the "mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, imagination, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem-solving and decision-making, comprehension and production of language. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and discover new knowledge.
An image schema is a recurring structure within our cognitive processes which establishes patterns of understanding and reasoning. As an understudy to embodied cognition, image schemas are formed from our bodily interactions, from linguistic experience, and from historical context. The term is introduced in Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind; in case study 2 of George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: and further explained by Todd Oakley in The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics; by Rudolf Arnheim in Visual Thinking; by the collection From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics edited by Beate Hampe and Joseph E. Grady.
The picture superiority effect refers to the phenomenon in which pictures and images are more likely to be remembered than are words. This effect has been demonstrated in numerous experiments using different methods. It is based on the notion that "human memory is extremely sensitive to the symbolic modality of presentation of event information". Explanations for the picture superiority effect are not concrete and are still being debated.
In cognitive psychology, chunking is a process by which small individual pieces of a set of information are bound together to create a meaningful whole later on in memory. The chunks, by which the information is grouped, are meant to improve short-term retention of the material, thus bypassing the limited capacity of working memory and allowing the working memory to be more efficient. A chunk is a collection of basic units that are strongly associated with one another, and have been grouped together and stored in a person's memory. These chunks can be retrieved easily due to their coherent grouping. It is believed that individuals create higher-order cognitive representations of the items within the chunk. The items are more easily remembered as a group than as the individual items themselves. These chunks can be highly subjective because they rely on an individual's perceptions and past experiences, which are linked to the information set. The size of the chunks generally ranges from two to six items but often differs based on language and culture.
Situated cognition is a theory that posits that knowing is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts.
Eleanor Rosch is an American psychologist. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in cognitive psychology and primarily known for her work on categorization, in particular her prototype theory, which has profoundly influenced the field of cognitive psychology.
In psychology and neuroscience, memory span is the longest list of items that a person can repeat back in correct order immediately after presentation on 50% of all trials. Items may include words, numbers, or letters. The task is known as digit span when numbers are used. Memory span is a common measure of working memory and short-term memory. It is also a component of cognitive ability tests such as the WAIS. Backward memory span is a more challenging variation which involves recalling items in reverse order.
The concept of motor cognition grasps the notion that cognition is embodied in action, and that the motor system participates in what is usually considered as mental processing, including those involved in social interaction. The fundamental unit of the motor cognition paradigm is action, defined as the movements produced to satisfy an intention towards a specific motor goal, or in reaction to a meaningful event in the physical and social environments. Motor cognition takes into account the preparation and production of actions, as well as the processes involved in recognizing, predicting, mimicking, and understanding the behavior of other people. This paradigm has received a great deal of attention and empirical support in recent years from a variety of research domains including embodied cognition, developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and social psychology.
Vittorio Gallese is professor of Psychobiology at the University of Parma, Italy, and was professor in Experimental Aesthetics at the University of London, UK (2016–2018). He is an expert in neurophysiology, cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. Gallese is one of the discoverers of mirror neurons. His research attempts to elucidate the functional organization of brain mechanisms underlying social cognition, including action understanding, empathy, language, mindreading and aesthetic experience.
The early left anterior negativity is an event-related potential in electroencephalography (EEG), or component of brain activity that occurs in response to a certain kind of stimulus. It is characterized by a negative-going wave that peaks around 200 milliseconds or less after the onset of a stimulus, and most often occurs in response to linguistic stimuli that violate word-category or phrase structure rules. As such, it is frequently a topic of study in neurolinguistics experiments, specifically in areas such as sentence processing. While it is frequently used in language research, there is no evidence yet that it is necessarily a language-specific phenomenon.
Priming is the idea that exposure to one stimulus may influence a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention. The priming effect refers to the positive or negative effect of a rapidly presented stimulus on the processing of a second stimulus that appears shortly after. Generally speaking, the generation of priming effect depends on the existence of some positive or negative relationship between priming and target stimuli. For example, the word nurse might be recognized more quickly following the word doctor than following the word bread. Priming can be perceptual, associative, repetitive, positive, negative, affective, semantic, or conceptual. Priming effects involve word recognition, semantic processing, attention, unconscious processing, and many other issues, and are related to differences in various writing systems. Onset of priming effects can be almost instantaneous.
Embodied cognition is the concept suggesting that many features of cognition are shaped by the state and capacities of the organism. The cognitive features include a wide spectrum of cognitive functions, such as perception biases, memory recall, comprehension and high-level mental constructs and performance on various cognitive tasks. The bodily aspects involve the motor system, the perceptual system, the bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness), and the assumptions about the world built the functional structure of organism's brain and body.
Embodied cognition occurs when an organism's sensorimotor capacities, body and environment play an important role in thinking. The way in which a person's body and their surroundings interacts also allows for specific brain functions to develop and in the future to be able to act. This means that not only does the mind influence the body's movements, but the body also influences the abilities of the mind, also termed the bi-directional hypothesis. There are three generalizations that are assumed to be true relating to embodied cognition. A person's motor system is activated when (1) they observe manipulable objects, (2) process action verbs, and (3) observe another individual's movements.
Embodied bilingual language, also known as L2 embodiment, is the idea that people mentally simulate their actions, perceptions, and emotions when speaking and understanding a second language (L2) as with their first language (L1). It is closely related to embodied cognition and embodied language processing, both of which only refer to native language thinking and speaking. An example of embodied bilingual language would be situation in which a L1 English speaker learning Spanish as a second language hears the word rápido ("fast") in Spanish while taking notes and then proceeds to take notes more quickly.
The bi-directional hypothesis of language and action proposes that the sensorimotor and language comprehension areas of the brain exert reciprocal influence over one another. This hypothesis argues that areas of the brain involved in movement and sensation, as well as movement itself, influence cognitive processes such as language comprehension. In addition, the reverse effect is argued, where it is proposed that language comprehension influences movement and sensation. Proponents of the bi-directional hypothesis of language and action conduct and interpret linguistic, cognitive, and movement studies within the framework of embodied cognition and embodied language processing. Embodied language developed from embodied cognition, and proposes that sensorimotor systems are not only involved in the comprehension of language, but that they are necessary for understanding the semantic meaning of words.
Intuitive statistics, or folk statistics, is the cognitive phenomenon where organisms use data to make generalizations and predictions about the world. This can be a small amount of sample data or training instances, which in turn contribute to inductive inferences about either population-level properties, future data, or both. Inferences can involve revising hypotheses, or beliefs, in light of probabilistic data that inform and motivate future predictions. The informal tendency for cognitive animals to intuitively generate statistical inferences, when formalized with certain axioms of probability theory, constitutes statistics as an academic discipline.
Social cognitive neuroscience is the scientific study of the biological processes underpinning social cognition. Specifically, it uses the tools of neuroscience to study "the mental mechanisms that create, frame, regulate, and respond to our experience of the social world". Social cognitive neuroscience uses the epistemological foundations of cognitive neuroscience, and is closely related to social neuroscience. Social cognitive neuroscience employs human neuroimaging, typically using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Human brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct-current stimulation are also used. In nonhuman animals, direct electrophysiological recordings and electrical stimulation of single cells and neuronal populations are utilized for investigating lower-level social cognitive processes.
Kate Nation is an experimental psychologist and expert on language and literacy development in school age children. She is Professor of Experimental Psychology and Fellow of St. John's College of the University of Oxford, where she directs the ReadOxford project and the Language and Cognitive Development Research Group.
David Holcman is an applied mathematician, biophysicist and computational biologist at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He is known for his work on the narrow escape problem, the redundancy principle in biology, the modeling of molecular trafficking in neurobiology, of diffusion and electrodiffusion in dendritic spines, the modeling of neuronal network dynamics such as Up and Down states in electrophysiology. He developed multiscale methods to analyse large amount of molecular super-resolution trajectories, and polymer physics modeling and analysis to study cell nucleus organization. These approaches led to several verified predictions in the life sciences such as nanocolumn organization of synapses or astrocytic protrusion penetrating neuronal synapses.
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