Perceptual Symbol Systems

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Research Notes:

1)      Perceptual Symbol System- P.S’s are schematic neural representations that are multimodal, across multiple sensory modalities, sensorimotor, proprioceptive, and introspective.

a.       Perceptual symbols activate when the body performs some function or interacts with the environment in any way. They are the schematic neural representation of the embodied action. These perceptual symbols then combine when they are related to form a simulator.

b.      A simulator is a concept. A simulator contains frames which organize the perceptual symbols into groups within the simulator.

                                                            i.      For example: The simulator car can have frames for wheels which contains the perceptual symbols of hub-cap and lug nuts. The Hubcap frame can be further specialized to contain the perceptual symbols for lug nuts, spaces between spokes etc.

c.       They are not holistic symbols that represent the whole neural activation of a certain activity. They are schematic representations. Selective attention likely plays a role in the selection of certain traits that become stored in long term memory.

d.      P.S.S are not amodal. They resemble the thing that they represent in space. Amodal symbols, like those of cognitivism, do not have any basis in reality.

e.       They are multimodal in that they can have a schematic representation of multiple sensory modalities. They can have a representation of the sound a car has, the feeling of excitement one has when inside, or any other feeling that is associated with car. These p.s.’s all come together to form the simulator, concept, of the perceieved event car. Later this simulator is used to run an infinite amount of simulations of the car.

f.       A simulation is a physical experience or imagined experience of a simulator. Such as my physical encounter with car. I draw upon my base of p.s. to interpret this encounter. New p.s. are created upon further inspection of a new car and the simulator for car is updated. Simulators are dynamic. They evolve with each encounter for the simulation.

g.      These p.s. are largely unconscious. They are not like mental images. They lie in the unconscious of the mind that provide a base for the conscious representation of concepts. This side steps a lot of problems that arise when dealing with imagism. Imagism holds that cognition is the manipulation of images within the brain, but they fail to explain how these images are encoded and what system is utilized during there representation within the brain.

h.      Shortcomings: Barsalou’s theory of applying p.s. to abstract concept falls short of coherency. His concept of truth in his paper on p.s. is less of truth and more of a type of matching or something of the sort.

                                                            i.      Also, Barsalou does not state explicitly how the certain features of perceptual symbols are selected for schematic representation.