3 Nov
2023
3 Nov
'23
3:21 p.m.
The Department of Cognitive Science
cordially invites you
to the public defense of the PhD thesis
Not a Pipe - STAND-FOR Relations in Human Cognition
by
Barbu Revencu
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2 P.M. CET|
Room D001 (CEU, Quellenstrasse 51, 1100 Vienna)
(Zoom: Meeting:
https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/95582871844?pwd=VWRpWUovT3pPOWtISUVyZ2grR2szdz09&…
Meeting ID: 955 8287 1844
Passcode: 678897
PRIMARY SUPERVISOR: Gergely Csibra (CEU)
SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: Dan Sperber (CEU)
Members of the Dissertation Committee:
Natalie Sebanz, Chair, CEU
Professor Elizabeth
Spelke<https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/elizabeth-s-spelke>ke>, External
examiner, Harvard, Department of Psychology
Hannes
Rakoczy<https://www.psych.uni-goettingen.de/de/development/team/rakoczy-hannes/hannes-rakoczy>,
External examiner Georg-Elias-Müller-Institut für
Psychologie<https://www.psych.uni-goettingen.de/de>
*Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna must RSVP
here<https://forms.office.com/e/dxV4Ch4ZKk> to get access to the lecture hall.
ABSTRACT | Local assignments from visually available object symbols to entities under
discussion underlie representational STAND-FOR relations and are ubiquitous across many
forms of human communication, such as pretend play, puppet shows, diagrams, or animations
(e.g., a banana stands for a phone, a puppet stands for an agent).
Chapter 1 lays out a cognitive architecture that can explain how humans represent
STAND-FOR relations. The architecture consists of two representational layers-one for the
perceptually available symbols (object indexes), one for the entities under discussion
(discourse referents)-and an assignment function that maps the object indexes to the
discourse referents. Once the mappings are established, the information conveyed through
the symbol object is interpreted as applying to the discourse referent. I illustrate the
architecture with early object substitution pretense and argue that it provides a better
and more general account of pretend play than alternative views.
Chapter 2 asks whether 19-month-old infants take on-screen events to occur in the here and
now or think that on-screen events are decoupled from the immediate environment. Across
four experiments, I show that infants reject animation-reality crossovers but accept the
depiction of the same animated environment on multiple screens. The results are consistent
with the possibility that 19-month-olds interpret animations as external representations.
Chapter 3 tests several components of the cognitive architecture outlined in Chapter 1. I
present evidence that 15-month-old infants can map arbitrary visual symbols onto familiar
discourse referents based on predicative expressions (e.g., "Look! A duck!")
applied to geometric shapes (e.g., a circle). Additional experiments show (i) that infants
restrict the assignments to the speaker who stipulated them; (ii) that infants use their
conceptual knowledge when interpreting subsequent events involving the symbols; and (iii)
that alternative explanations cannot account for the central finding. The results show
that the cognitive mechanism underlying the representation of STAND-FOR relations is
easily activated and available early in human ontogeny.
Chapter 4 moves from infants to adults and asks whether photographs of objects undergo
object recognition or symbol interpretation. I present evidence from a Stroop task
indicating that adults interpret images of toys as the objects the toys are toys of-not as
the toys themselves. A control experiment shows that the association between an image of a
toy and the object the toy stands for is not automatic. When images of toys are displayed
against the objects the toys represent, adults interpret them as depictions of toys. The
results indicate that adults interpret images as symbols and compute what the images stand
for even when this is irrelevant to the task at hand.
Chapter 5 provides an overall summary of the empirical findings in Chapters 2-4. I then
discuss a recent debate in cognitive development on the use of symbols in research-Theory
of Puppets-and link it to the theoretical framework laid out in Chapter 1 and to the
experiments in Chapters 2-4. I end by presenting several avenues for future research and
one long-term theoretical goal of the project.
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