Kensy Cooperrider

The tangle of space and time in human cognition

Everyday concepts of duration, of sequence, and of past, present, and future are fundamental to how humans make sense of experience. In culture after culture, converging evidence from language, co-speech gesture, and behavioral tasks suggests that humans handle these elusive yet indispensable notions by construing them spatially. Where do these spatial construals come from and why do they take the particular, sometimes peculiar, spatial forms that they do? As researchers across the cognitive sciences pursue these questions on different levels--cultural, developmental--in diverse populations and with new methodologies, clear answers will depend upon a shared and nuanced set of theoretical distinctions. Time is not a monolith, but rather a mosaic of construals with distinct properties and origins.

Number concepts without number lines in an indigenous group of Papua New Guinea.

Background The generic concept of number line, which maps numbers to unidimensional space, is a fundamental concept in mathematics, but its cognitive origins are uncertain. Two defining criteria of the number line are that (i) there is a mapping of each individual number (or numerosity) under consideration onto a specific location on the line, and (ii) that the mapping defines a unidimensional space representing numbers with a metric — a distance function. It has been proposed that the number line is based on a spontaneous universal human intuition, rooted directly in brain evolution, that maps number magnitude to linear space with a metric. To date, no culture lacking this intuition has been documented. Methodology/Principal Findings By means of a number line task, we investigated the universality proposal with the Yupno of Papua New Guinea. Unschooled adults did exhibit a number-to-space mapping (criterion i) but, strikingly, despite having precise cardinal number concepts, they located numbers only on the endpoints, thus failing to use the extent of the line. The produced mapping was bi-categorical and metric-free, in violation of criterion ii. In contrast, Yupnos with scholastic experience used the extent of the segment according to known standards, but they did so not as evenly as western controls, exhibiting a bias towards the endpoints. Conclusions/Significance Results suggest that cardinal number concepts can exist independently from number line representations. They also suggest that the number line mapping, although ubiquitous in the modern world, is not universally spontaneous, but rather seems to be learned through — and continually reinforced by — specific cultural practices.

The Continuity of Metaphor: Evidence from Temporal Gestures.

Reasoning about bedrock abstract concepts such as time, number, and valence relies on spatial metaphor and often on multiple spatial metaphors for a single concept. Previous research has documented, for instance, both future-in-front and future-to-right metaphors for time in English speakers. It is often assumed that these metaphors, which appear to have distinct experiential bases, remain distinct in online temporal reasoning. In two studies we demonstrate that, contra this assumption, people systematically combine these metaphors. Evidence for this combination was found in both directly elicited (Study 1) and spontaneous co-speech (Study 2) gestures about time. These results provide first support for the hypothesis that the metaphorical representation of time, and perhaps other abstract domains as well, involves the continuous co-activation of multiple metaphors rather than the selection of only one.

Spatial analogies pervade complex relational reasoning: Evidence from spontaneous gestures

How do people think about complex phenomena like the behavior of ecosystems? Here we hypothesize that people reason about such relational systems in part by creating spatial analogies, and we explore this possibility by examining spontaneous gestures. In two studies, participants read a written lesson describing positive and negative feedback systems and then explained the differences between them. Though the lesson was highly abstract and people were not instructed to gesture, people produced spatial gestures in abundance during their explanations. These gestures used space to represent simple abstract relations (e.g., increase) and sometimes more complex relational structures (e.g., negative feedback). Moreover, over the course of their explanations, participants’ gestures often cohered into larger analogical models of relational structure. Importantly, the spatial ideas evident in the hands were largely unaccompanied by spatial words. Gesture thus suggests that spatial analogies are pervasive in complex relational reasoning, even when language does not.

Where Does the Ordered Line Come From? Evidence From a Culture of Papua New Guinea

Number lines, calendars, and measuring sticks all represent order along some dimension (e.g., magnitude) as position on a line. In high-literacy, industrialized societies, this principle of spatial organization—linear order—is a fixture of visual culture and everyday cognition. But what are the principle’s origins, and how did it become such a fixture? Three studies investigated intuitions about linear order in the Yupno, members of a culture of Papua New Guinea that lacks conventional representations involving ordered lines, and in U.S. undergraduates. Presented with cards representing differing sizes and numerosities, both groups arranged them using linear order or sometimes spatial grouping, a competing principle. But whereas the U.S. participants produced ordered lines in all tasks, strongly favoring a left-to-right format, the Yupno produced them less consistently, and with variable orientations. Conventional linear representations are thus not necessary to spark the intuition of linear order—which may have other experiential sources—but they nonetheless regiment when and how the principle is used.

The Preference for Pointing With the Hand Is Not Universal

Pointing is a cornerstone of human communication, but does it take the same form in all cultures? Manual pointing with the index finger appears to be used universally, and it is often assumed to be universally preferred over other forms. Non-manual pointing with the head and face has also been widely attested, but it is usually considered of marginal significance, both empirically and theoretically. Here, we challenge this assumed marginality. Using a novel communication task, we investigated pointing preferences in the Yupno of Papua New Guinea and in U.S. undergraduates. Speakers in both groups pointed at similar rates, but form preferences differed starkly: The Yupno participants used non-manual pointing (nose- and head-pointing) numerically more often than manual pointing, whereas the U.S. participants stuck unwaveringly to index-finger pointing. The findings raise questions about why groups differ in their pointing preferences and, more broadly, about why humans communicate in the ways they do.

The Co-Organization of Demonstratives and Pointing Gestures.

Demonstratives and pointing gestures are universal, early emerging, and ubiquitous, and it has long been claimed that there is a special relationship between them. But what exactly is the nature of this relationship? The present study investigates this question using a referential communication task. Speakers referred to targets that were near or far and pointed with the hand (more ambiguous) or a laser pointer (less ambiguous). Demonstratives and pointing frequently co-occurred but were also related in less obvious ways: speakers (1) used fewer demonstrative-pointing combinations when pointing was ambiguous, (2) preferred proximal demonstratives when pointing and distals when not pointing, and (3) used fewer proximal demonstratives when pointing was ambiguous. These findings suggest that the relationship between demonstratives and pointing goes beyond one of mere co-occurrence or functional resemblance and reveal some of the principles by which speakers organize these two powerful tools in relation to each other.

The Palm-Up Puzzle: Meanings and Origins of a Widespread Form in Gesture and Sign

During communication, speakers commonly rotate their forearms so that their palms turn upward. Yet despite more than a century of observations of such palm-up gestures, their meanings and origins have proven difficult to pin down. We distinguish two gestures within the palm-up form family: the palm-up presentational and the palm-up epistemic. The latter is a term we introduce to refer to a variant of the palm-up that prototypically involves lateral separation of the hands. This gesture—our focus—is used in speaking communities around the world to express a recurring set of epistemic meanings, several of which seem quite distinct. More striking, a similar palm-up form is used to express the same set of meanings in many established sign languages and in emerging sign systems. Such observations present a two-part puzzle: the first part is how this set of seemingly distinct meanings for the palm-up epistemic are related, if indeed they are; the second is why the palm-up form is so widely used to express just this set of meanings. We propose a network connecting the different attested meanings of the palm-up epistemic, with a kernel meaning of absence of knowledge, and discuss how this proposal could be evaluated through additional developmental, corpus-based, and experimental research. We then assess two contrasting accounts of the connection between the palm-up form and this proposed meaning network, and consider implications for our understanding of the palm-up form family more generally. By addressing the palm-up puzzle, we aim, not only to illuminate a widespread form found in gesture and sign, but also to provide insights into fundamental questions about visual-bodily communication: where communicative forms come from, how they take on new meanings, and how they become integrated into language in signing communities.

When Gesture Becomes Analogy

Analogy researchers do not often examine gesture, and gesture researchers do not often borrow ideas from the study of analogy. One borrowable idea from the world of analogy is the importance of distinguishing between attributes and relations. Gentner (, ) observed that some metaphors highlight attributes and others highlight relations, and called the latter analogies. Mirroring this logic, we observe that some metaphoric gestures represent attributes and others represent relations, and propose to call the latter analogical gestures. We provide examples of such analogical gestures and show how they relate to the categories of iconic and metaphoric gestures described previously. Analogical gestures represent different types of relations and different degrees of relational complexity, and sometimes cohere into larger analogical models. Treating analogical gestures as a distinct phenomenon prompts new questions and predictions, and illustrates one way that the study of gesture and the study of analogy can be mutually informative.

Making the rounds

A richly illustrated compendium probes the colorful history of the circle Many of the almost 300 illustrations found in Manuel Limas The Book of Circles open up portals to other worlds. Among them, we find one of the earliest pie charts, created in 1805 to visualize the area of different states in America; a yet-to-be-deciphered disk, produced in 1700 B.C.E. on the island of Crete; and a finely detailed Korean star chart, based on a stone engraving from 1395. The images come from different times and places and afford glimpses into different systems of knowledge and preoccupations. What unites them is their reliance on the same elemental shape.