Literary Spatial Pattering, Visual Perception and Syntactic - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Literary Spatial Pattering, Visual Perception and Syntactic Deceleration

Liz Finnigan

Southern Regional College, N.I.Slide2

Overview

Spatial Pattering in Literature

Global to Local Visual Processing: A Topological Approach

Episodic Memory, Episodic Future Thinking and Pattern Survival

Embodied Models of Language Processing

Syntactic Deceleration

Spatial Patterning in Visual Narrative?Slide3

Spatial Patterning: topological frames

These are passages in a text where the spatial detail is typically delivered for the sake of orientation and information

Deliver a specific reference to the location and view of the narrator/

character, highly visual and absent of motion.

From the texts

analysed

, I categorize the frames into those of setting, place and peopleSlide4

Pattern types

Setting: Progressive pattern of proximal to distal

Places: Bouncing pattern of a

centre

-edge binary

People: Loop pattern:

Outline/Head pattern1

Outline/Head/Body pattern 2Slide5

Pattern examples: setting

Setting – landscapes

Jane Eyre 1847

‘I went to my window, opened it, and looked out. There were the two wings of the BUILDING; there was the GARDEN; there were the

SKIRTS

OF LOWOOD; there was the

hilly

HORIZON

.’ (

Brontë

2001

[1847], p.72)

Slide6

Pattern examples: places

I stood and warmed my numbed fingers over the blaze then I looked

round

; there was no candle but the uncertain light from the hearth

showed

, by intervals, papered walls (EDGE), carpet (CENTRE),

curtains

(EDGE),

shining mahogany

furniture (CENTRE): it was a

parlour

, not so spacious or splendid as the drawing-room at

Gateshead

, but comfortable enough. (Bronte 2001 [1847], p.35)Slide7

Pattern example: people 1

Anna Karenina

(1878

)

‘In him, in his handsome, radiant

FIGURE,

his sparkling

EYES,

black

HAIR

and

EYEBROWS,

and the white and red of his

FACE,

there was something which produced a physical effect of kindliness and good

humor

on the people who met him’. (Tolstoy 1998 [1878] p.55)Slide8

Pattern example: people 2

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea 1870

They

obviously were true Papuans, men of fine stock, athletic in BUILD, FOREHEAD high and broad, NOSE large but not flat, TEETH white. Their woolly, red–tinted HAIR was in sharp contrast to their BODIES, which were black and glistening like those of Nubians. (Verne [1870])Slide9

Global to Local Visual Processing: Gibson

Chen’s model is underpinned by Gibson’s (1979; 1986) work on direct perception

‘Extracting the invariants from the stimulus flux’ (Gibson 1986)

Problematic: mapping on to the visual array

Not a rigorous theory; intuitive onlySlide10

Global to Local Visual Processing

Chen (2005) ‘The Topological Approach to Perceptual Organization’

Form perception before motion perception

Revisits early Gestalt groupings of perceptual organization

Global to Local processing: topological geometry is the most stable in that it is able to resist transformations or change – Klein’s hierarchy

Tolerance mapping solves connectedness issueSlide11

Global to Local patterning?

Holes in backgrounds – Gestalt

surroundedness

and connectivity

Figure and Ground: this is relative

An object can be a figure however, it can also be the background

Jacket – object against a background of bedroom wall, button can be the object against the background of the jacket. Slide12

Episodic Memory and narrative

Visual primitive: can it survive in imagined space?

‘Numerous researchers have shown that parts of the brain used in vision are also involved in visual mental imagery’ (

Kosslyn

et al. 1993, p.264)Slide13

Episodic Memory and narrative

Episodic Memory: Tulving (1972; 1984, 2002) – encoding an retrieval

Episodic Future Thinking: Buckner and Carroll

Theory of Mind (

2007);

Schacter

and Addis (2008; 2009) – event construction

Hasselmo

(2009) –

visual perception survives intact during the translation process into the memory system

Slide14

Episodic Memory and narrative

‘Episodic memory includes the capacity to mentally retrace trajectories through previously visited locations, including re-experiencing specific stimuli

… thus

, you could think of retrieval of an environment in terms of the memory of an episodic trajectory through the environment that would reactivate associated objects or views’ (

Hasselmo

2013). Slide15

Episodic Memory and narrative

Scene or event construction involves the mental generation and

maintenance

of a complex and coherent scene or event. This is achieved by the reactivation, retrieval and integration of relevant

semantic

, contextual and sensory components, stored in their modality specific cortical areas, the product of which has a coherent

spatial

context (Hassabis and Maguire 2009, p.1268)Slide16

Textual Processing

I

argue

that language processing does not interfere with the translation process rather, it sustains it.

There is a lack of specific research on narrative production (Mar 2004)

Pickering and

Garrod

‘An integrated theory of language production and comprehension’ (2013)

Slide17

Textual Processing

Mar

suggests

that narrative production is not neurologically bound to language processing

.

Narrative

p

rocesses stem from memory:

‘…these

brain areas appear to be unique to

narrative

–processing

, separate from those identified for word and even sentence-level operations.

‘Slide18

Grounded Models

They exist within a symbolic structure – the representational operations of episodic future thinking – however, they remain as an intact percept and do not become symbols in themselves

.

Zwaan’s Immersed Experiencer Framework

The primary contribution of this theory is the idea that words automatically activate experiences of their referents’ (Mar 2004, p.1417). Slide19

Textual Processing

Visual representations of object shape and orientation are routinely and immediately activated during word and sentence comprehension…visual-spatial information primes sentence processing and may

interfer

with

comprehension (

Zwaan

2003)

V

isual

perception would actually override any linguistic structure.

Slide20

Textual ProcessingI argue: when

a narrative is read it initiates a chain of retro processing and brings into being an overall representational symbol whose sub-components are records of the original stimuli – in the case of the patterns this is the visual primitive. Slide21

Syntactic Deceleration

I argue

that the translation from an internal representation to that of an external merely slows the whole process down so that patterns can be identified

Narrative

production enables the identification of patterning when it would be otherwise to fast to detect.