La representación común de la magnitud y sus bases cerebrales (the common coding of magnitude and its brain bases)

Abstract

ENGLISH VERSION The question of how the mind/brain can understand and process abstract concepts has captured the attention of many research programmes in cognitive science. For many years we have attempted to explain how the brain can go beyond the physical world and work quite effortlessly with concepts that the senses cannot perceive. Different theories have been offered to explain abstract processing. Probably the most successful on the second half of the XX century was the classical information processing view, until evidence that perceptual and motor information is deeply involved in high level cognition started to accumulate. Theories that could account for these findings were proposed, being two of the most influential ones the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) and the common coding hypothesis, represented for example by A Theory of Magnitude (ATOM; Walsh, 2003). In this thesis we aimed to test crucial predictions of the common coding hypothesis, namely that the processing of different magnitudes should be closely associated. We used bisection tasks, which consist on the presentation of an interval defined by two edges (or anchors), and participants have to either estimate or judge the middle point. According to the common coding view, performance in the bisection of different magnitudes should covary within participants. We used these tasks with both concrete and abstract dimensions, and compared participants' performance between tasks. We carried out a set of three experiments that included spatial, temporal and also numerical bisection, with the general population as well as psychiatric and neuropsychological patients. In particular, schizophrenic and neglect patients, populations that have been described to differ from the general population in performance of the bisection of different magnitudes. We found only partial evidence in favour of the common coding hypothesis, suggesting that the theory would probably benefit from a more detailed elaboration. References: Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. Walsh, V. (2003). A theory of magnitude: Common cortical metrics of time, space and quantity. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(11), 483–488. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2003.09.002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------