Abstract
One of the challenges for perceptually grounded accounts of high-level cognition is to explain how people make connections and draw inferences between situations that superficially have little in common. Evidence suggests that people draw these connections even without having explicit, verbalizable knowledge of their bases. Instead, the connections are based on sub-symbolic representations that are grounded in perception, action, and space. One reason why people are able to spontaneously see relations between situations that initially appear to be unrelated is that their eventual perceptions are not restricted to initial appearances. Training and strategic deployment allow our perceptual processes to deliver outputs that would have otherwise required abstract or formal reasoning. Even without people having any privileged access to the internal operations of perceptual modules, these modules can be systematically altered so as to better serve our high-level reasoning needs. Moreover, perceptually based processes can be altered in a number of ways to closely approximate formally sanctioned computations. To be concrete about mechanisms of perceptual change, we present 21 illustrations of ways in which we alter, adjust, and augment our perceptual systems with the intention of having them better satisfy our needs.
Highlights
Whereas a novice physicist may group scenarios based on surface properties such as whether springs or inclined planes are involved, the expert instead groups problems on the basis of the deep law of physics required for solution, such as Newton’s second law or conservation of energy (Chi et al, 1981)
Whereas a child typically connects clouds to sponges via surface features such as “round and fluffy,” a more experienced adult may refer to more sophisticated relations such as “stores, and releases water” (Gentner, 1988), allowing the adult to see connections among clouds, sponges, cisterns, and reservoirs
Once the elemental composition of gold was identified, surface features like “yellow,”“malleable,” and “shiny” were no longer necessary for identifying an object as gold. Advantages of supplanting these surface features with the chemical feature “atomic number 79” are that the chemical feature offers the promise of a scientific causal account for why gold has the surface features that it does, and it provides a way of excluding objects like pyrite (“fool’s gold”) from the category of gold despite its possession of some of gold’s surface features
Summary
One of the challenges for perceptually grounded accounts of high-level cognition is to explain how people make connections and draw inferences between situations that superficially have little in common. The answer provided by these experiments to the question “If cognition is inherently grounded in perception, how can connections be made between superficially dissimilar domains?” is that people naturally and automatically translate scenarios that are not directly spatial into spatial representations, and perceptual priming can occur between these transformed representations.
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