Are spatial terms rooted in geometry or force-dynamics? Yes.

Theories of spatial term meanings often focus on geometric properties of objects and locations as the key to understanding meaning. For example, in English, "The cat is on the mat" might engage geometric properties characterizing the figure ('cat', a point) and the ground ('mat', a plane) as well as the geometric relationship between the two objects ('on', + vertical, 0 distance from ground object). However, substantial literature suggests that geometric properties are far from sufficient to capture the meanings of many spatial expressions, and that instead, force-dynamic properties of objects that afford containment or support relationships may be crucial to the meanings of those expressions.

A Phone in a Basket Looks Like a Knife in a Cup: Role-Filler Independence in Visual Processing.

When a piece of fruit is in a bowl, and the bowl is on a table, we appreciate not only the individual objects and their features, but also the relations and , which abstract away from the particular objects involved. Independent representation of roles (e.g.

"Dividing the labor": Lexical verbs and the linguistic encoding of physical support in 2- to 4.5-year-old children.

Infants reason about support configurations (e.g., teddy bear on table) and young children talk about a variety of support relations, including support-from-below (e.

Language and developmental plasticity after perinatal stroke.

The mature human brain is lateralized for language, with the left hemisphere (LH) primarily responsible for sentence processing and the right hemisphere (RH) primarily responsible for processing suprasegmental aspects of language such as vocal emotion. However, it has long been hypothesized that in early life there is plasticity for language, allowing young children to acquire language in other cortical regions when LH areas are damaged. If true, what are the constraints on functional reorganization? Which areas of the brain can acquire language, and what happens to the functions these regions ordinarily perform? We address these questions by examining long-term outcomes in adolescents and young adults who, as infants, had a perinatal arterial ischemic stroke to the LH areas ordinarily subserving sentence processing.

Where word and world meet: Language and vision share an abstract representation of symmetry.

Symmetry is ubiquitous in nature, in logic and mathematics, and in perception, language, and thought. Although humans are exquisitely sensitive to visual symmetry (e.g.

Characterizing the Details of Spatial Construction: Cognitive Constraints and Variability.

Spatial construction-the activity of creating novel spatial arrangements or copying existing ones-is a hallmark of human spatial cognition. Spatial construction abilities predict math and other academic outcomes and are regularly used in IQ testing, but we know little about the cognitive processes that underlie them. In part, this lack of understanding is due to both the complex nature of construction tasks and the tendency to limit measurement to the overall accuracy of the end goal.

Developmental changes in neural lateralization for visual-spatial function: Evidence from a line-bisection task.

Studies of hemispheric specialization have traditionally cast the left hemisphere as specialized for language and the right hemisphere for spatial function. Much of the supporting evidence for this separation of function comes from studies of healthy adults and those who have sustained lesions to the right or left hemisphere. However, we know little about the developmental origins of lateralization.

The privileging of 'Support-From-Below' in early spatial language acquisition.

Spatial terms that encode support (e.g., "on", in English) are among the first to be understood by children across languages (e.

How does a blind person see? Developmental change in applying visual verbs to agents with disabilities.

Classic theories emphasize the primacy of first-person sensory experience for learning meanings of words: to know what "see" means, one must be able to use the eyes to perceive. Contrary to this idea, blind adults and children acquire normative meanings of "visual" verbs, e.g.

Development of bilateral parietal activation for complex visual-spatial function: Evidence from a visual-spatial construction task.

The neural representation of visual-spatial functions has traditionally been ascribed to the right hemisphere, but little is known about these representations in children, including whether and how lateralization of function changes over the course of development. Some studies suggest bilateral activation early in life that develops toward right-lateralization in adulthood, while others find evidence of right-hemispheric dominance in both children and adults. We used a complex visual-spatial construction task to examine the nature of lateralization and its developmental time course in children ages 5-11 years.

Functions of ventral visual cortex after bilateral medial temporal lobe damage.

Repeated stimuli elicit attenuated responses in visual cortex relative to novel stimuli. This adaptation can be considered as a form of rapid learning and a signature of perceptual memory. Adaptation occurs not only when a stimulus is repeated immediately, but also when there is a lag in terms of time and other intervening stimuli before the repetition.

Editor's Introduction: 2017 Rumelhart Prize Issue Honoring Lila R. Gleitman.

This is the Editor's introduction to the Special Issue of TopiCS in honor of Lila R. Gleitman's receipt of the 2017 David E. Rumelhart Prize.

Spatial language difficulties reflect the structure of intact spatial representation: Evidence from high-functioning autism.

Previous studies have shown that the basic properties of the visual representation of space are reflected in spatial language. This close relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic spatial systems has been observed both in typical development and in some developmental disorders. Here we provide novel evidence for structural parallels along with a degree of autonomy between these two systems among individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder, a developmental disorder with uneven cognitive and linguistic profiles.

Impaired behavioral and neural representation of scenes in Williams syndrome.

Boundaries are crucial to our representation of the geometric shape of scenes, which can be used to reorient in space. Behavioral research has shown that children and adults share exquisite sensitivity to a defining feature of a boundary: its vertical extent. Imaging studies have shown that this boundary property is represented in the parahippocampal place area (PPA) among typically developed (TD) adults.

Revisiting the Landmark Task as a tool for studying hemispheric specialization: What's really right?

The "Landmark Task" (LT) is a line bisection judgment task that predominantly activates right parietal cortex. The typical version requires observers to judge bisections for horizontal lines that cross their egocentric midline and therefore may depend on spatial attention as well as spatial representation of the line segments. To ask whether the LT is indeed right-lateralized regardless of spatial attention (for which the right hemisphere is known to be important), we examined LT activation in 26 neurologically healthy young adults using vertical (instead of horizontal) stimuli, as compared with a luminance control task that made similar demands on spatial attention.

Learning Simple Spatial Terms: Core and More.

How do children learn the meanings of simple spatial prepositions like in and on? In this paper, I argue that children come to spatial term learning with an a priori conceptual distinction between core versus non-core concepts of containment and support, and that they learn how language maps onto this distinction by considering both the simple prepositions and the company they keep-that is, the distributions of their co-occurrences with particular verbs. Core types of containment and support are largely expressed by in/on together with the light verb BE; non-core types are expressed by lexical verbs such as insert, hang, stick, and so on, which represent the specific mechanical means by which containment or support is achieved. These latter types arguably depend on extensive learning about the particular mechanisms of containment and support, many of which are invented by humans, as well as learning the specific lexical verbs that encode these mechanisms.

Detailed Visual Memory Capacity Is Present Early in Childhood.

Previous studies have shown that adults are able to remember more than 1,000 images with great detail. However, little is known about the development of this visual capacity, nor its presence early in life. This study tests the level of detail of young children's memory for a large number of items, adapting the method of Brady, Konkle, Alvarez, and Oliva (2008).

Bilateral parietal activations for complex visual-spatial functions: Evidence from a visual-spatial construction task.

In this paper, we examine brain lateralization patterns for a complex visual-spatial task commonly used to assess general spatial abilities. Although spatial abilities have classically been ascribed to the right hemisphere, evidence suggests that at least some tasks may be strongly bilateral. For example, while functional neuroimaging studies show right-lateralized activations for some spatial tasks (e.

Dissociating intuitive physics from intuitive psychology: Evidence from Williams syndrome.

Prior work suggests that our understanding of how things work ("intuitive physics") and how people work ("intuitive psychology") are distinct domains of human cognition. Here we directly test the dissociability of these two domains by investigating knowledge of intuitive physics and intuitive psychology in adults with Williams syndrome (WS) - a genetic developmental disorder characterized by severely impaired spatial cognition, but relatively spared social cognition. WS adults and mental-age matched (MA) controls completed an intuitive physics task and an intuitive psychology task.

The importance of lexical verbs in the acquisition of spatial prepositions: The case of in and on.

The prepositions in and on appear early in children's descriptions of simple containment and support relations, such as "apple in the bowl" and "cup on the table". However, mature use of these basic terms extends across a very broad range of object configurations, raising the question of whether children and adults share the same underlying semantic space, and if so, how children's use of in and on comes to match that of adults. With a new battery containing diverse object configurations, we asked how 4 and 6 year-olds and adults distribute basic spatial expressions (isin, is on) and lexical verbs (hang, attach, etc.

Update on "What" and "Where" in Spatial Language: A New Division of Labor for Spatial Terms.

In this article, I revisit Landau and Jackendoff's () paper, "What and where in spatial language and spatial cognition," proposing a friendly amendment and reformulation. The original paper emphasized the distinct geometries that are engaged when objects are represented as members of object kinds (named by count nouns), versus when they are represented as figure and ground in spatial expressions (i.e.

Containment and Support: Core and Complexity in Spatial Language Learning.

Containment and support have traditionally been assumed to represent universal conceptual foundations for spatial terms. This assumption can be challenged, however: English in and on are applied across a surprisingly broad range of exemplars, and comparable terms in other languages show significant variation in their application. We propose that the broad domains of both containment and support have internal structure that reflects different subtypes, that this structure is reflected in basic spatial term usage across languages, and that it constrains children's spatial term learning.

Declarative memory and skill-related knowledge: Evidence from a case study of amnesia and implications for theories of memory.

Theoretical and empirical studies of memory have long been framed by a distinction between declarative and non-declarative memory. We question the sharpness of the distinction by reporting evidence from amnesic L.S.

Spatial Language and the Embedded Listener Model in Parents' Input to Children.

Language is a collaborative act: To communicate successfully, speakers must generate utterances that are not only semantically valid but also sensitive to the knowledge state of the listener. Such sensitivity could reflect the use of an "embedded listener model," where speakers choose utterances on the basis of an internal model of the listener's conceptual and linguistic knowledge. In this study, we ask whether parents' spatial descriptions incorporate an embedded listener model that reflects their children's understanding of spatial relations and spatial terms.