Perceptual foundations of abstract thought

How do people think about things they can never see or touch? The ability to invent and reason about domains such as time, ideas, or mathematics is uniquely human, and is arguably the hallmark of human sophistication. Yet, how people mentally represent these abstract domains has remained one of the great mysteries of the mind. This dissertation explores a potential solution: perhaps the mind recruits old structures for new uses. Perhaps sensory and motor representations that result from physical interactions with the world (e.g., representations of physical space) are recycled to support our thinking about abstract phenomena. This hypothesis is motivated, in part, by patterns observed in language: in order to talk about abstract things, speakers often recruit metaphors from more concrete or perceptually rich domains. For example, English speakers often talk about time using spatial language (e.g., a long vacation; a short meeting). Cognitive linguists have argued such expressions reveal that people conceptualize abstract domains like time metaphorically, in terms of space. Although linguistic evidence for this Conceptual Metaphor Theory is abundant, the necessary nonlinguistic evidence has been elusive.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Casasanto, Daniel J

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Lera Boroditsky.

• Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/34129

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34129