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Harnad, S. (2003b) Categorical Perception . Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science . Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan. http://www.youtube.com...
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(10a. Comment Overflow) (50+)
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Psychology PSYC 538, Winter 2018: Categorization, Communication and Consciousness Time : Tuesdays 2:35-5:25 Place : STBIO S3/3 ...
From my past linguistics classes, I was very surprised during class's discussion to find that there actually are no Worfian effects on colors. That's to say, regardless of whether or not your language has the word for blue and green or if there is just a "grue/bleen" equivalent, you are still able to perceive the differences between the colors. Similarly with the many Inuit terms for snow, it is not a question of the quality of the perception but the quantity of words needed to describe it. Taking an example from class, while it is true that in English there is not one specific word for "snow from last night that melted a little bit" like there might be in other languages, we can still describe and perceive the differences between this and "freshly fallen snow". Though we cannot say it in only one word, we can still perceive and differentially categorize.
ReplyDeleteI also liked the section about abstract categories. To an extent, I think that a lot of categorization is subjective. Like it said, some members of a category might better exemplify that category compared to others (that categorization is a continuum, not all or nothing membership). Antisocial Personality Disorder is characterized by constant deceitfulness without a necessary motive and violations of other people's rights. I wonder how their categorization about goodness and truth came to be and if it is different from my own. Further, I wonder if the underpinnings of the cognitive processes to facilitate the categorization are fundamentally different in every person for every category, innately the same, or learnt with time to be specific to the environment.
Categories guide and influence our behavior upon the world, our thinking and our way of seeing the world. Interestingly, most of these categories are not only learned with experience, but they are also invented by humans. They consist of sets of elements that share a similarity that are observable or that can be described. These categories are created to distinguish some things from other things. Thus, they are created from a reference to other things or in other words, in comparison with other things. There would be no categories if there would be nothing to compare or to discriminate. Therefore, I think that a language is not enough to create categories because experience and sensory information is needed in order to have something to categorize. Even if language may be enough to change the perception of a category and some components of it, it cannot create it; it can only modify it.
ReplyDelete"That is enough to rehabilitate the Whorf Hypothesis from its apparent failure on color terms (and perhaps also from its apparent failure on eskimo snow terms, Pullum 1989), but to show that it is a full-blown language effect, and not merely a vocabulary effect, it will have to be shown that our perception of the world can also be warped, not just by how things are named but by what we are told about them."
ReplyDeleteI find this conclusion to be especially interesting because it brings up an important point in the categorization discussion. Specifically, the idea that in order to show that it is a 'full-blown language effect' we must be able to show that our perception of the world can be warped based on what we are TOLD about things. I suppose that it depends how you define what it means to 'warp our perception of the world' and how strongly the warping must occur. If I am suddenly told (but do not first-hand experience) that all of the apples in the world are plagued and suddenly no longer edible (far-fetched, but for simplicity sake) surely my perception of the world will now be warped. Would something of this magnitude be considered 'what we are told about' the 'things' or is this still an instance of 'how said thing is named'? If it's the latter, what would qualify as warping our perception of the world based on what we are told about them, since if we are told something contrary to what we have previously believed, are we not also altering the category into which that thing belongs?
I find it extremely interesting how language can warp our perception of the world. I don't think categories and CP can be acquired through language alone, since something has to be grounded in sensorimotor experience along the way in order for higher order categories (such as 'bachelor') to be formed. However, it has been shown that categories and their accompanying CP can be acquired through language when "grounded" by a sensorimotor experience. These language-acquired categories such as "goodness" or "truth" are subject to compression/separation effects, just as less abstract categories are. If it is shown that our perception can be warped not only by how things are named or categorized, but also by what we are told about them/what we know or are made to believe about them, this could have significant implications in several fields of psychology, stereotypes, prejudice, and how we socialize our children. This interplay between naming/categorizing and culture/society could potentially have massive implications for racism, feminism, homophobia, etc. Perhaps how we describe people accounts for our views about them. For example, could calling a 30 year old female a "girl" instead of a "woman" change the way people view her and her capabilities?
ReplyDelete“There are even recent demonstrations that although the primary color and speech categories are probably inborn, their boundaries can be modified or even lost as a result of learning, and weaker secondary boundaries can be generated by learning alone.”
ReplyDeleteThis segment made me think of the child Genie who was found at the age of 13 chained in a garage that didn’t have language acquirement and stayed at the most basic level of language. She never learned to talk properly. My hypothesis is that since she didn’t learn language at her critical age period she never lost her boundaries of speech categories so her case study could be good to study the boundaries of speech.
“ Neural imaging studies have shown that these effects are localized and even lateralized to certain brain regions in subjects who have successfully learned the category, and are absent in subjects who have not.”
I also found this segement interesting. As a neuroscience buff I like how language is localized in the lateral left side of the brain. Taking categorical perception into mind; this is proof that categories are learned since they are absent in subjects who haven’t learned categorical perception of language.