Basic Color Terms (BCTs) and Categories (BCCs) in Three Dialects of the Spanish Language: Interaction Between Cultural and Universal Factors.

Two experiments were performed to identify and compare the Basic Color Terms (BCTs) and the Basic Color Categories (BCCs) included in three dialects (Castilian, Mexican, and Uruguayan) of the Spanish language. Monolexemic Elicited lists were used in the first experiment to identify the BCTs of each dialect. Eleven BCTs appeared for the Spanish and the Mexican, and twelve did so for the Uruguayan. The six primary BCTs (rojo "red," verde "green," amarillo "yellow," azul "blue," negro "black," and blanco "white") appeared in the three dialects. This occurred for only three derived BCTs (gris "gray," naranja "orange," and rosa "pink") but not for the other five derived BCTs (celeste "sky blue," marrón "brown," café "brown," morado "purple," and violeta "purple"). Color transitions were used in the second experiment for two different tasks. Extremes naming task was used to determine the relation between two different dialects' BCTs: equality, equivalence or difference. The results provided the first evidence for marrón "brown" and café "brown" being equivalent terms for the same BCC (brown in English) as is the case of morado "purple" and violeta "purple." Uruguayan celeste "sky blue" had no equivalent BCT in the other two dialects. Boundary delimitation task required the selection of the color in the boundary between two categories. The task was used to reasonably estimate the volume occupied by each BCC in the color space considering its chromatic area and lightness range. Excluding sky blue (celeste "sky blue") and blue (azul "blue"), the other BCCs color volumes were similar across the three dialects. Uruguayan sky blue and blue volumes conjointly occupied the portion of the color space corresponding to the Castilian and Mexican blue BCC. The fact that the BCT celeste "sky blue" only appeared in Uruguayan very probably derived from specific cultural factors (the use of the color in the flags and the arrival of an important number of Italian immigrants). Nevertheless, these cultural factors seem to nurture from a perceptive structuring of the color space, which nature is universal, as the boundaries of this category can be delimited from the responses of Spanish and Mexican participants.

I don't get you. Action observation effects inverted by kinematic variation.

Recent studies have reported an intricate interplay between affordance and mirror effects (the imitation of another agent) when participants attend to the concurrent presentation of an object and another agent interacting with it. In the present paper, we compare two experimental settings in which an observed action was presented as a prime for a task involving the categorization of a graspable object. In experiment 1a, the action depicted a reach and grasp gesture whereas in experiment 1b, only the reach phase was presented. This modification led to very different outcomes. Experiment 1a reflected the traditional imitation effect elicited by human motion. Conversely, experiment 1b showed the facilitation of contralateral responses. Affordance effects were found in experiment 1a only for the RVF. Our results support the view that motor simulation processes underlying imitation or joint actions are extremely sensitive to specific phase kinematics.

Temporal dynamics of action contribution to object categorization

La presentación de un gesto de agarre facilita el reconocimiento de un objeto presentado a continuación cuando el gesto es coherente con el objeto a identificar. Este efecto se explica habitualmente como el resultado de la integración de dos procesos visuales diferentes: procesos descriptivos asociados a áreas visuales ventrales y procesos a cargo de la computación de las métricas de acción en áreas visuales dorsales. Con el objetivo de explorar la dinámica temporal de esta interacción llevamos a cabo un experimento en el que los participantes categorizaron objetos precedidos por gestos de agarre congruentes y no congruentes luego de distintos intervalos temporales (ISI). Los gestos de agarre y los objetos se presentaron separados por cinco intervalos entre estímulos distintos (ISI): 0, 250, 500, 1,000, y 2,000 ms. Los resultados mostraron respuestas significativamente más cortas para los casos congruentes en las condiciones de ISI de 250 y 500 ms. Sin embargo, no se encontró efecto para las restantes condiciones de ISI (0, 1,000 y 2,000). Estos resultados sugieren que la contribución automática de áreas visuomotoras dorsales para el reconocimiento de objetos es más robusta hasta 500 ms después de la desaparición del estímulo facilitador, y que la identificación de objetos es facilitada por un gesto manual de agarre en el marco de una ventana temporal concreta (250–500 ms)(AU)

The presentation of a hand grasp facilitates the recognition of subsequent objects when the grasp is coherent with the object to be identified. This outcome is usually explained as the integration of two different processes: descriptive visual processes in ventral visual areas and processes in charge of the computations of action metrics in dorsal visual regions. With the aim to explore the temporal dynamics of this interaction, we conducted an experiment in which participants categorized objects preceded by congruent and incongruent hand grasp gestures under different interstimulus interval (ISI) conditions. Hand grasp gestures and target objects were separated by five different interstimulus intervals (ISI): 0, 250, 500, 1000, and 2000 ms. Results showed significant shorter response times for congruent trials than for incongruent trials for ISI conditions of 250 and 500 ms. However, no effect was found for the other ISIs (0, 1,000 and 2,000). These results suggest that the contribution of automatically driven visuomotor dorsal areas in object recognition is stronger up to 500 ms after prime offset, and that object identification is facilitated by hand gesture primes just inside this time window (250–500 ms)(AU)