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Reading Words Hurts: The impact of pain sensitivity on people’s ratings of pain-related words.In Erica Cosentino, Markus Werning & Kevin Reuter (eds.), Reading Words Hurts: The impact of pain sensitivity on people’s ratings of pain-related words, . 2015.
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18Reading words hurts: the impact of pain sensitivity on people’s ratings of pain-related wordsLanguage and Cognition 9 (3): 553-567. 2017.This study explores the relation between pain sensitivity and the cognitive processing of words. 130 participants evaluated the pain-relatedness of a total of 600 two-syllabic nouns, and subsequently reported on their own pain sensitivity. The results demonstrate that pain-sensitive people associate words more strongly with pain than less sensitive people. In particular, concrete nouns like ‘syringe’, ‘wound’, ‘knife’, and ‘cactus’ are considered to be more pain-related for those who are more pa…Read more
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8Right and Wrong Reasons for CompositionalityIn Markus Werning, Edouard Machery & Gerhard Schurz (eds.), The Compositionality of Meaning and Content. Volume I - Foundational Issues,, De Gruyter. pp. 285-310. 2005.
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96Synesthesia, sensory-motor contingency, and semantic emulation: how swimming style-color synesthesia challenges the traditional view of synesthesiaFrontiers in Psychology / Research Topic Linking Perception and Cognition in Frontiers in Cognition 3 (279): 1-12. 2012.Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which an additional nonstandard perceptual experience occurs consistently in response to ordinary stimulation applied to the same or another modality. Recent studies suggest an important role of semantic representations in the induction of synesthesia. In the present proposal we try to link the empirically grounded theory of sensory-motor contingency and mirror system based embodied simulation to newly discovered cases of swimming-style color synesthesia. In the la…Read more
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178Constructing a wider view on memory: Beyond the dichotomy of field and observer perspectivesIn Anja Berninger & Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination, Routledge. pp. 165-190. 2022.Memory perspectives on past events allegedly take one of two shapes. In field memories, we recall episodes from a first-person point of view, while in observer memories, we look at a past scene from a third-person perspective. But this mere visuospatial dichotomy faces several practical and conceptual challenges. First, this binary distinction is not exhaustive. Second, this characterization insufficiently accounts for the phenomenology of observer memories. Third, the focus on the visual aspect…Read more
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11The “complex first” paradoxInteraction Studies. Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systemsinteraction Studies / Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systemsinteraction Studies 9 (1): 67-83. 2008.The Complex-First Paradox regards the semantics of nouns and consists of a set of together incompatible, but individually well confirmed propositions about the evolution and development of language, the semantics of word classes and the cortical realization of word meaning. Theoretical and empirical considerations support the view that the concepts expressed by concrete nouns are more complex and their neural realizations more widely distributed in cortex than those expressed by other word class…Read more
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21Introduction to the special issue “Logical perspectives on science and cognition”Synthese 197 (4): 1381-1390. 2020.
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145Reliable knowledge and social epistemology: essays on the philosophy of Alvin Goldman and replies by Goldman (edited book)Rodopi. 2009.The volume contains the written versions of all papers given at the workshop, divided into five chapters and followed by Alvin Goldman's replies in the sixth.
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127Minds, persons, and space: An fMRI investigation into the relational complexity of higher-order intentionalityConsciousness and Cognition 17 (2): 438-450. 2008.Mental state reasoning or theory-of-mind has been the subject of a rich body of imaging research. Although such investigations routinely tap a common set of regions, the precise function of each area remains a contentious matter. With the help of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we sought to determine which areas are involved when processing mental state or intentional metarepresentations by focusing on the relational aspect of such representations. Using non-intentional relational …Read more
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75Predicting the Past from Minimal Traces: Episodic Memory and its Distinction from Imagination and PreservationReview of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (2): 301-333. 2020.The paper develops an account of minimal traces devoid of representational content and exploits an analogy to a predictive processing framework of perception. As perception can be regarded as a prediction of the present on the basis of sparse sensory inputs without any representational content, episodic memory can be conceived of as a “prediction of the past” on the basis of a minimal trace, i.e., an informationally sparse, merely causal link to a previous experience. The resulting notion of epi…Read more
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17Investigating the Comprehension of Negated Sentences Employing World Knowledge: An Event-Related Potential StudyFrontiers in Psychology 10. 2019.
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24The Compositionality of Meaning and Content. Volume I - Foundational Issues, (edited book)De Gruyter. 2005.Representational systems such as language, mind and perhaps even the brain exhibit a structure that is often assumed to be compositional. That is, the semantic value of a complex representation is determined by the semantic value of their parts and the way they are put together. Dating back to the late 19th century, the principle of compositionality has regained wide attention recently. Since the principle has been dealt with very differently across disciplines, the aim of the two volumes is to …Read more
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61Introduction to the 2nd Synthese Special Issue: trends in philosophy of language and mindSynthese 195 (8). 2018.
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159The Time-Course of Sentence Meaning Composition. N400 Effects of the Interaction between Context-Induced and Lexically Stored AffordancesFrontiers in Psychology 8 248173. 2017.Contemporary semantic theories can be classified along two dimensions: (i) the way and time-course in which contextual factors influence sentence truth-conditions; and (ii) whether and to what extent comprehension involves sensory, motor and emotional processes. In order to explore this theoretical space, our ERP study investigates the time-course of the interaction between the lexically specified telic component of a noun (the function of the object to which the noun refers to, e.g., a funnel i…Read more
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61Doing without metarepresentation: Scenario construction explains the epistemic generativity and privileged status of episodic memoryBehavioral and Brain Sciences 41. 2018.
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197Compositionality, context, categories and the indeterminacy of translationErkenntnis 60 (2): 145-178. 2004.The doctrine that meanings are entitieswith a determinate and independent reality is often believed tohave been undermined by Quine's thought experiment of radicaltranslation, which results in an argument for the indeterminacy oftranslation. This paper argues to the contrary. Starting fromQuine's assumption that the meanings of observation sentences arestimulus meanings, i.e., set-theoretical constructions of neuronalstates uniquely determined by inter-subjectively observable facts,the paper sho…Read more
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Lexicon in action: N400 effect on affordances and telicity.In P. Bello (ed.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Austin, Tx: Cognitive Science Society. pp. 2079-84. 2014.
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21The “complex first” paradox: Why do semantically thick concepts so early lexicalize as nouns?Interaction Studies 9 (1): 67-83. 2008.
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18How to Compose Contents A Review of Jerry Fodor's In Critical Condition: Polemical Essays on Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of MindPSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 8. 2002.The paper critically reviews Jerry Fodor's book In Critical Condition: Polemic Essays on Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind. It focuses on Fodor's compositionality arguments and their relevance to the following questions: How should concepts be individuated? What has semantics to do with epistemology? Who is right in the debate over classical and connectionist theories of cognition? How can the semantic properties of a mental state be inherited from the semantic properties of the state…Read more
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104Ventral versus dorsal pathway: The source of the semantic object/event and the syntactic noun/verb distinction?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (3): 299-300. 2003.Experimental data suggest that the division between the visual ventral and dorsal pathways may indeed indicate that static and dynamical information is processed separately. Contrary to Hurford, it is suggested that the ventral pathway primarily generates representations of objects, whereas the dorsal pathway produces representations of events. The semantic object/event distinction may relate to the morpho-syntactic noun/verb distinction.
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46Synchrony and composition: Toward a cognitive architecture between classicism and connectionismIn Benedikt Löwe, Thoralf Räsch & Wolfgang Malzkorn (eds.), Foundations of the Formal Sciences II, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 261--278. 2003.
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207Conceptual fingerprints: Lexical decomposition by means of frames – a neuro-cognitive modelIn U. Priss, S. Polovina & R. Hill (eds.), Conceptual structures: Knowledge architectures for smart applications, . 2007.Frames, i.e., recursive attribute-value structures, are a general format for the decomposition of lexical concepts. Attributes assign unique values to objects and thus describe functional relations. Concepts can be classified into four groups: sortal, individual, relational and functional concepts. The classification is reflected by different grammatical roles of the corresponding nouns. The paper aims at a cognitively adequate decomposition, particularly, of sortal concepts by means of frames. …Read more
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254Reading Words Hurts: The impact of pain sensitivity on people’s ratings of pain-related wordsIn D. C. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings & P. P. Maglio (eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Science Society. pp. 453-458. 2015.This study explores the relation between pain sensitivity and the cognitive processing of words. 130 participants evaluated the pain-relatedness of a total of 600 two-syllabic nouns, and subsequently reported on their own pain sensitivity. The results demonstrate that pain-sensitive people (based on their self-report) associate words more strongly with pain than less sensitive people. In particular, concrete nouns like syringe, wound, knife, and cactus, are considered to be more pain-related for…Read more
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74The evolutionary and social preference for knowledge: How to solve meno’s problem within reliabilismGrazer Philosophische Studien 79 (1): 137-156. 2009.This paper addresses various solutions to Meno's Problem: Why is it that knowledge is more valuable than merely true belief? Given both a pragmatist as well as a veritist understanding of epistemic value, it is argued that a reliabilist analysis of knowledge, in general, promises a hopeful strategy to explain the extra value of knowledge. It is, however, shown that two recent attempts to solve Meno's Problem within reliabilism are severely flawed: Olsson's conditional probability solution and Go…Read more
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12High- vs Low-Level Cognition and the Neuro- Emulative Theory of Mental RepresentationIn Ulrich Gähde, Stephan Hartmann & Jörn Henning Wolf (eds.), Models, Simulations, and the Reduction of Complexity, De Gruyter. pp. 141-152. 2013.
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25The evolutionary and social preference for knowledge: How to solve meno’s problem within reliabilismGrazer Philosophische Studien 79 (1): 137-156. 2009.
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45Composition and replay of mnemonic sequences: The contributions of REM and slow-wave sleep to episodic memoryBehavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (6): 610-611. 2013.We propose that rapid eye movement (REM) and slow-wave sleep contribute differently to the formation of episodic memories. REM sleep is important for building up invariant object representations that eventually recur to gamma-band oscillations in the neocortex. In contrast, slow-wave sleep is more directly involved in the consolidation of episodic memories through replay of sequential neural activity in hippocampal place cells.