Deep Dive 2

Question 1

High-dimensional semantic space account

Answer 1

• Meaning of each individual word is represented in how often that words occurs in conjunction with other words
• Derived from language corpora (newspapers, blogs, etc.)
• Targets for lexical decision: association and inference.

Question 2

How meaning is stored in the brain

Answer 2

As patterns of inhibition and excitation.
Strength of connections between neurons.

Question 3

Analogy of brain and chinese room

Answer 3

1. Spoken and written words are like chinese characters entering the chinese room
2. Meaning representations in the brain is like John Searle in the chinese room
3. Connections between neurons in the brain function as the rule book in the chinese rules

Question 4

Grounding problem

Answer 4

Manipulating symbols according to set of rules does not lead to understanding.

Solution:
Meaning is not symbolic/abstract but anchored in experience.
Mental representations is not abstract but directly connected to the physical world.

Question 5

Indexical hypothesis

Answer 5

Experiential components are crucial for language comprehension. Indexing, that is, referring words and phrases to object is required for comprehension.

Question 6

Grounded cognition

Answer 6

Meaning is not abstract but it’s connected to experience.
Affordances: how you interact with an object.

Question 7

Perceiving movement

Answer 7

Lateral occipital temporal cortex
Biological motion: posterior STS
non-Biological motion: Posterior MTG

Question 8

Neural Representational Dissimilarity Matrix (RDM)

Answer 8

Does the neural activation pattern of word X resemble the pattern of word Y.

Question 9

Embodied model RDM

Answer 9

If the neural activation of word X highly resembles activation pattern of word Y, this coincides with high overlap in the human judgements of the modality specific experiences between those two words.

Question 10

Object motion brain area

Answer 10

V5