Séminaire ayant lieu dans le cadre du Doctorat en informatique cognitive, en alliance avec le centre de recherche CRIA et l'ISC  

Penny PEXMAN

Jeudi le 13 avril 2023 à 10h30

PK-5115 (possible d'y assister à distance, pour ce faire, vous devez vous inscrire ici) 

Titre : Multimodal Grounding of Abstract Concepts 

Résumé

Abstract concepts, like wisdom, joy, and friendship, are central to our mental and social lives and yet they cannot be directly experienced through the senses. As such, they pose a challenge for cognitive models that assume a central role for sensorimotor information in the way we learn and understand concepts. There is growing recognition, however, that it is possible for meaning to be ‘grounded’ in other ways. In a series of studies, my colleagues and I have explored the roles of language, emotion, and socialness in the acquisition and representation of abstract concepts. I will describe that research and its implications for our understanding of human cognition.

 Biographie 

Penny PEXMAN is Professor of Psychology and Associate Vice-President (Research) at the University of Calgary. She directs the Language Processing Lab at UCalgary and is a member of both the Hotchkiss Brain Institute and the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute. Her research expertise is in cognitive development, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. In broad terms, she is interested in how we derive meaning from language, and how those processes are changed by damage or experience. An award-winning researcher and mentor, Penny has published over 150 journal articles and book chapters on those topics.  

References  

Lund, T. C., Sidhu, D. M., & Pexman, P. M. (2019). Sensitivity to emotion information in children’s lexical processing. Cognition, 190, 61-71.

Pexman, P. M. (2019). The role of embodiment in conceptual development. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 34, 1274-1283. doi: 10.1080/23273798.2017.1303522.

Pexman, P. M., Diveica, V., & Binney, R. J. (2023). Social semantics: The organisation and grounding of abstract concepts. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 378: 1870. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2021.0363

Zdrazilova, L., Sidhu, D. M., & Pexman, P. M. (2018). Communicating abstract meaning: Concepts revealed in words and gestures. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 373: 20170138 doi: 10.1098/rstb.2017.0138