Partecipanti: Martin Fischer - University of Potsdam, Germany
Abstract:
Do language and arithmetic calculation share a common underlying mechanism?
Have syntax and arithmetic a similar brain activation? The question of whether there are shared representations across linguistic and mathematical domains and how they work has received some attention in the recent psychological and neuroscience literature, but there is as yet no consensus about the answer to this question. Within this framework, in a theoretically and methodologically novel ways, a specific case has been delineated: whether a similar mechanism underlies linguistic negation and mathematical subtraction. The first novelty of our approach consists in bridging two different research lines, i.e. research on arithmetic processing and on language processing. A further novelty consists in adopting the embodied cognition approach, according to which all concepts, including abstract notions of negation, are grounded in perception, action and emotional systems. Analyzing with behavioral methods, new evidence on language-mathematic shared representations will be presented and discussed.
The topic of this lesson is highly multidisciplinary and it will be likely of interest for a wide community of researchers in fields as diverse as mathematics, linguistic and psychology. We hope that researchers of these different fields could find some inspirations and some food for thought for their research projects.