Symbolic Systems Forum - Daniel Casasanto, Psychology Department

Daniel Casasanto, Psychology Department

"Space For Thinking"

ABSTRACT:

How do people think about things they can never see or touch? The ability to invent and reason about abstract domains such as time, ideas, or mathematics is arguably the hallmark of human sophistication. Yet, how people mentally represent these abstract concepts has remained one of the great mysteries of the mind. Metaphors in language suggest a potential solution. When people talk about abstract phenomena, they often recruit words from more concrete or perceptually rich domains, such as space (e.g., a LONG time; a HIGH price; a LARGE number). Does metaphoric language reveal something fundamental about the structure of thought?

In this talk, I will describe a series of nonlinguistic, psychophysical experiments testing the idea that people not only talk about abstract domains using spatial language, they also think about them using 'recycled' representations of physical space. Together, these studies suggest that even our most abstract thoughts depend in part upon our physical experiences. Furthermore, cross-linguistic results demonstrate that the language we use to describe abstract phenomena not only provides a window on our underlying mental representations, but also shapes those representations, such that people from different language communities develop distinctive conceptual repertoires.