Speaker: Gabor Brody

Affiliation: Postdoctoral Researcher, Brown University

Title: How context shapes what symbols mean

Abstract: Humans are surrounded with symbols: objects that are used to convey meaning. There is immense variation both in the objects used to symbolize and their attributed meanings. Some symbols like statues are made out of stuff and can last for millennia; others like spoken words are ephemeral soundwaves. Some meanings are concrete (e.g. a statue of Marie Curie is about a particular person); others are abstract (e.g. the meaning of the word "justice"). There have been tremendous progress across the cognitive sciences in characterizing the mental processes that connect symbols to meanings. One recurring idea is that humans have particular biased preferences to assume that symbols have well-defined and non-overlapping meanings (e.g. a picture that resembles a apple should symbolize a apple; a word that is not "apple" should mean something other than apple). In this talk, I will present two case studies that raise the possibility that some of these preferences do not reflect internal biases, but result from participants reasoning about (experimental) contexts. One case study is from language acquisition, where I explore the 'mutual exclusivity' phenomenon -- children's expectation that different words should have non-overlapping meanings. The second is a case study from vision science and explores the 'size-stroop effect' -- the finding that adults automatically retrieve the real-life size of pictured objects. In both cases, our findings suggest that the interpretation of symbols is dependent on experimental presentation of linguistic and extralinguistic context, and not on biased expectations.

Location: 46-3037 (Note different room than usual)

Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/3473065359