100,365 research outputs found
Spatial text processing: are estimates of time and distance influenced by the age of characters and readers?
No full textIt is widely accepted that, while hearing or reading a story, people continuously form and update mental representations of the characters, places and events being described, based on plausible spatial, temporal or intentional details. According to the embodied cognition approach, the mental representations that accompany text reading are grounded in each reader's own sensorimotor experiences. Two experiments were conducted to examine whether readers' estimates of time and distance are influenced by age, their own and that of the character being described. In Experiment 1, 182 young adults read the description of a route in a town being covered by a young or an elderly character. In Experiment 2, the same descriptions as in Experiment 1 were read by 121 young adults and 53 older people. To avoid a possible confound, a follow-up to Experiment 1 (Experiment 1a) repeated the study by removing from texts the adverbs describing the walking speed of characters. In all experiments, participants were asked to estimate: (a) the time the characters took to reach their destinations (time estimation task); and (b) the distance they covered (distance estimation task). The results showed that both characters' and readers' ages influenced the time estimated, whereas no effects were found on estimates of distance: the elderly character was estimated to take longer than the young character (Experiments 1, 1a and 2), and older readers estimated longer times than younger readers (Experiment 2). This prompts the conclusion that personal features of both the readers and the characters they read about were used to infer the temporal dimension of situations described in the narratives. The theoretical implications of the findings are discussed
Scienze della mente
No full textIl volume affronta in una prospettiva interdisciplinare alcuni temi rilevanti nello studio della mente, intesa come sistema complesso in cui intervengono aspetti biologici, cognitivi e sociali. Attraverso il contributo di studiosi che si occupano di antropologia, semiotica, filosofia della mente, sociologia, biologia evoluzionistica, psicologia cognitiva, psicologia comparata, neuropsicologia, psicofisiologia, reti neurali e robotica, la mente viene cosi' vista come insieme di funzioni adattive specifiche, che si evolvono a partire da bisogni primari ed emergono da una struttura biologica sottostante. Nel volume trova spazio il dibattito recente su alcune questioni centrali nelle science cognitive: il ruolo delle neuroscienze, la prospettiva della cognizione incarnata ("embodied cognition"), l'affermarsi del connessionismo e dei sistemi dinamici complessi, il ruolo adattivo del comportamento e le origini evoluzioniste dei processi cognitivi
Personal space
No full textPersonal space concept is updated by describing the germane concept of peripersonal space, introducing new measurement methods (e.g. neuroimaging and virtual reality) and new research findings (e.g. neural bases and social modulation of peripersonal distance)
Introduzione
No full textL'introduzione fornisce un quadro generale delle motivazioni alla base della realizzazione del volume.
I principali punti: la necessita' di un approccio multidisciplinare allo studio della mente, la necessita' di considerare le relazioni tra mente, cervello e corpo, la necessita' di adottare una prospettiva evoluzionista nello studio di questi problemi
Perceived temperature modulates peripersonal and interpersonal spaces differently in men and women
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