Does language change what we perceive? Does speaking different languages cause us to
perceive things differently? We review the behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for …

The paper introduces a new perspective on abstract concepts (eg “freedom”) and their
associate words representation, the Words As social Tools (WAT) view. Traditional theories …

How is it that thoroughly physical material beings such as ourselves can think, dream, feel,
create and understand ideas, theories and concepts? How does mere matter give rise to all …

What determines what we see? In contrast to the traditional “modular” understanding of
perception, according to which visual processing is encapsulated from higher-level …

Common sense suggests that emotions are physical types that have little to do with the
words we use to label them. Yet recent psychological constructionist accounts reveal that …

Human perceptual decisions are often described as optimal. Critics of this view have argued
that claims of optimality are overly flexible and lack explanatory power. Meanwhile …

Abstract Abstract concepts (“freedom”) differ from concrete ones (“cat”), as they do not have
a bounded, identifiable, and clearly perceivable referent. The way in which abstract …

Within the cognitive sciences, most researchers assume that it is the job of linguists to
investigate how language is represented, and that they do so largely by building theories …

Language is central to our lives, the cultural tool that arguably sets us apart from other
species. Some scientists have argued that language is innate, a type of unique …

Linguistic labels (eg,“chair”) seem to activate visual properties of the objects to which they
refer. Here we investigated whether language-based activation of visual representations can …