Pink is for girls and blue is for boys, so says the traditional adage. But what about the boy who likes pink, or the girl who likes blue? This study aimed to assess the effect of color stereotypes on children’s memory and judgment. Children from two preschools were told the favorite colors of stimulus children, then asked to distribute colored toys to these children, and to verbally recall thei...

We describe complementary iconic and symbolic representations for parsing the visual world. The iconic pixmap representation is operated on by an extensible set of “visual routines” (Ullman, 1984; Forbus et al., 2001). A symbolic representation, in terms of lines, ellipses, blobs, etc., is extracted from the iconic encoding, manipulated algebraically, and re-rendered iconically. The two represe...

BACKGROUND Previous research has found that people with aphasia produce more spontaneous iconic gesture than control participants, especially during word-finding difficulties. There is some evidence that impaired semantic knowledge impacts on the diversity of gestural handshapes, as well as the frequency of gesture production. However, no previous research has explored how impaired semantic kno...

To identify neural regions that automatically respond to linguistically structured, but meaningless manual gestures, 14 deaf native users of American Sign Language (ASL) and 14 hearing non-signers passively viewed pseudosigns (possible but non-existent ASL signs) and non-iconic ASL signs, in addition to a fixation baseline. For the contrast between pseudosigns and baseline, greater activation w...

Intention is to show how the concepts of Peircean semeiotic can be transformed to interactivist ones, and what restrictions this transformation brings along to the application of Peircean concepts especially to biosemiotics. The basic interactive re-interpretation of Peircean semeiotic for biosemiotics can be done with three levels of representation. At the first level, the concept of minimal (...

This paper examines the use of iconic words in early conversations between children and caregivers. The longitudinal data include a span of six observations of 35 children-parent dyads in the same semi-structured activity. Our findings show that children’s speech initially has a high proportion of iconic words, and over time, these words become diluted by an increase of arbitrary words. Parents...

The kinematics of movement of all five digits was analyzed during reach-and-grasp tasks for a variety of objects. Ten healthy subjects performed 20 trials involving the grasp of five objects of distinct size and shape. Joint angles were recorded, and digit trajectories were computed using forward kinematics. For a given subject, fingertip trajectories were consistent across trials. The differen...