Conversations About Psychology, Volume 2

Howard Burton

• Publisher: Ideas Roadshow
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781771701709
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Neuroscienza e neuropsicologia cognitiva

FIVE BOOKS IN ONE! This collection includes the following 5 complete Ideas Roadshow books featuring leading researchers providing fully accessible insights into cutting-edge academic research while revealing the inspirations and personal journeys behind the research. A detailed preface highlights the connections between the different books and all five books are broken into chapters with a detailed introduction and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter: 1. The Psychology of Bilingualism - A Conversation with Ellen Bialystok, Professor of Psychology at York University. Ellen Bialystok is a world-leading expert on the effects of bilingualism on cognitive processes across our lifespan. This extensive conversation examines how Ellen discovered differences in the development of essential cognitive and language abilities for bilingual children, the use of different brain networks by monolingual and bilingual young adults performing simple conflict tasks, and the postponement of symptoms of dementia in bilingual older adults, and many more fascinating aspects of bilingualism. 2. Speaking and Thinking - A Conversation with Victor Ferreira, Professor of Psychology and Principal Investigator at the Language Production Lab at the University of California at San Diego. This extensive conversation explores Victor Ferreira's research which is focused on language production, especially with regard to grammar, lexical structure and speaker-hearer interaction, and his interests to incorporate computational and quantitative modelling of cognitive processing. Topics under discussion include key experimental results that change our view of what is actually going on when two people talk to each other, giving us new insight into the structure of language and also how many aspects of linguistics are related to our current understanding of how the brain and mind function. 3. Exploring Autism - A Conversation with Uta Frith, Professor of Cognitive Development at University College London and one of the world's leading experts on autism. Topics that are examined in this extensive conversation are what autism actually is, the reasons behind the increased number of diagnoses over the last few years, autism spectrum disorders, Asperger's syndrome, mentalizing, brain imaging to research the cognitive and neurobiological bases of autism and much more.4. Beyond Mirror Neurons - A Conversation with Greg Hickok, Professor of Cognitive science at UC Irvine, where he directs the Center for Language Science and the Auditory and Language Neuroscience Lab. This thought-provoking conversation examines Greg Hickok's neuroscience research related to speech and language which led him to eventually reject many aspects of the mirror neuron hypothesis, while giving his views on the mechanisms behind imitation and what mirror neurons really do.5. The Limits of Consciousness - A Conversation with Martin Monti, Associate Professor in Psychology and Neurosurgery, Brain Injury Research Centre, UCLA. This extensive conversation examines Martin Monti's innovative work with patients who are in a vegetative state or minimally conscious state which has led to some surprising results that might well prove to be integral to our development of a deeper understanding of consciousness.Howard Burton is the founder and host of all Ideas Roadshow Conversations and was the Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and an MA in philosophy.

Speaking and Thinking

A conversation with Victor Ferreira

Introduction

The Tip of the Tongue

UC San Diego psychologist Victor Ferreira makes a habit of paying attention to revealing little things that most of us routinely overlook.

For example, examine the following two sentences: The teacher knew I was going to be late and The teacher knew that I was going to be late. What’s the difference between them?

Not much, it seems, other than the innocuous “that” in the second sentence, which grammarians call a complementizer. But for Victor, Principal Investigator at UCSD’s Language Production Lab, this seemingly inconsequential “that” is little short of a linguistic gold mine.

The decision of a speaker to introduce, or not introduce, a “that” often has little effect on the difference in meaning between two phrases, so deciding whether to include or omit it seems to carry little to no consequence in terms of meaning.

“What’s valuable about the fact that there are sentences like this is that the word itself is practically meaningless. It’s very inconspicuous, but nonetheless the fact that the sentence requires that you have mentioned it (or not) means that your brain made the decision: Yes, this sentence requires a “that” or No, this sentence won’t have a “that”.

“I almost see it like a linguistic drosophila—it’s our fruit fly. If I can figure out what the factors are that compel a speaker to say a “that” in a sentence—or not—that’s going to tell me something about how our sentence construction mechanism works.”

So what has this linguistic drosophila done for us, exactly? Well, in a series of experiments, Victor and his colleagues have unexpectedly demonstrated that, in normal discourse, speakers aren’t nearly as focused on expressing things clearly as we might have naively thought.

It turns out that, in many instances at least, the speaker opts for constructions that are simply easier to say rather than easier to understand.

This may seem pretty selfish until we begin to appreciate all the complexities involved in the everyday act of normal speech production.

“It turns out that as a speaker, I’ve got a pretty big job all on my own. Every time I formulate, say, a 7-word sentence, I have to come up with the message that I want to get across; search my vocabulary—which typically has between 30,000 and 80,000 words—for the correct 7 words; figure out the correct grammatical ordering; figure out how to sound out the words; figure out how to impose this prosody on the sentence… And all of this at a rate of between 2-3 words per second. So there’s a lot going on.”

Far too much going on in most cases, it seems, for speakers to also be concerned with rigorously weighing up a spectrum of possible expressions to choose the one that best conveys their intended meaning.

So that’s a most interesting result. But even more impressive is the process, how linguistic researchers have devised ingenious ways to probe just how the brain’s speech and language functions operate.

And according to Victor, this is just the beginning, as modern brain-imaging technology has done little less than revolutionize the entire discipline.

“It’s really clear at this point that the fields of behavioural science, broadly speaking, and cognitive science specifically, are going through a kind of a neural revolution. The degree to which neuroscience techniques are going to be important for doing investigations of cognitive functions is increasing, and it’s just going to become more and more important.”

So we have vastly improved tools to test our theories these days. But what sorts of theories do we actually have?

“There are a number of factors pointing us toward a belief that our language knowledge is, in fact, shaped by ongoing experiences in a way that we hadn’t quite appreciated before.

“There’s a whole new line in cognitive science that has risen to prominence the last 10 or 15 years that views a lot of what human beings do as optimal. The common thread in a lot of this research is to take some instance when a human was seemingly behaving irrationally and show that, in fact, he’s behaving rationally when you take into account all the other factors that might be relevant.

“In the language sciences this has been unfolding in a way that suggests that the way we understand language, the way that we produce language, isn’t just some fixed grammar that gets into our head and stays that way. Rather, by responding to contingencies in our environment, our language system will change and adapt.

“It’s almost a tuning argument. So my lab is moving in this direction as well. We’re spending more time looking at what are the ways that you can show that there is some learning event that happened in your recent past that’s now going to change the way that you end up describing something in the future.”

According to this view, then, it’s not just that individual languages evolve in response to environmental stimuli, but so does our very capacity to produce and use language in the first place.

It’s a very big idea that, at first glance, seems miles away from the business of rigorously examining when someone might slip in a “that” or not in a sentence. But the beauty of experimental science is that many seemingly innocuous features of the system often turn out to be highly significant—indeed, many core aspects of our modern theory of language production came about through carefully studying speech errors in the 1970s.

For linguistics, then, just like many other disciplines, the devil is very much in the details, and carefully combing the subtleties of speech may well prove key to revealing the pivotal cognitive mechanisms of how the brain processes language—and, along the way, shed some deeply revealing light on what makes us human.

The Conversation

I. Linguistic Beginnings

In search of relevance

HB: You told me earlier that your sister was an inspiring figure for you in psycholinguistics. How did she inspire you, exactly?

VF: My parents, immigrants to Canada, were working-class folks. My dad was a construction worker. My mom worked both in the sewing industry and as a custodian. But my sister did really well in school so she went to university, because that’s what people who do well in school do.

She went to the University of Manitoba and did an honours project with a psycholinguist there named Murray Singer, who is a prominent figure in the field of text comprehension: how we understand passages of text and how we draw inferences from one sentence to another.

After the project, he suggested that she should go to graduate school because she was a natural at it. He advised her to apply to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which was one of the strongest schools in the world, especially in reading and eye-tracking. So she went to UMass Amherst and also worked with another leading researcher named Chuck Clifton.

She finished up her PhD in 1987 and then took a job at the University of Alberta. This is just as I was finishing up high school.

HB: Was this a postdoctoral fellowship or an assistant professorship?

VF: She went straight to an assistant professorship.

HB: Okay. So she’s an Assistant Professor in psycholinguistics at the University of Alberta and had this very accomplished beginning to her career, but how did that affect you and your career? Presumably you looked up to your sister and were inspired. Was that it? Or was there also something else involved?

VF:...