I mean what you see: the role of first person sensory experience in shaping the cognitive and neural bases of concepts
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Date
2019-11-20
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
In my dissertation, I inquire into the origin of knowledge through the lens of blindness – which has served as a window into this question since Locke’s famous claim that a blind person could never entertain ideas of vision. Through a series of fMRI studies with adults and behavioral studies with children, I provide evidence that first-person sensory experience is neither necessary nor sufficient to acquire rich lexico-semantic representations. Blind individuals represent entity and event concepts similarly to sighted individuals – even though they have never seen. By contrast, sighted children, who could just “shut their eyes and see”, have difficulties grasping a blind person’s experience – ironically, the reverse of Locke’s prediction. These findings suggest that linguistic and social inputs have a critical role in shaping our conceptual and neural representations.
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Keywords
sensory experience, concepts, cognition, neurobiology, verbs, nouns, events, entities, development, fMRI, blindness