Previous research has found that musicians’ pitch judgments, unlike non-musicians’, are influenced by syllable names. Although non-musicians fail to identify absolute pitches, they acknowledge the direction of pitch change. The present experiment investigated whether non-musicians’ judgments of pitch change can be influenced by the direction of syllable name change. Moreover, we examined the spatial, magnitudinal and sequential nature of pitches and syllable names. Participants (N = 33) were asked to hear two successive tones sung by syllable name and to judge the direction of pitch change by pressing vertically arranged buttons. Participants’ accuracy of pitch change judging was found to be influenced by the direction of syllable name change. However, the response location was not found to interact with pitch change or syllable name change. The distance effect was found in pitches but not in syllable names. A sequence effect was found that trials with early-in-sequence syllable names were responded faster than trials with late-in-sequence syllable names. These results suggest that syllable names can influence non-musicians’ pitch judgments in a relative context. We suggest that it is the sequential order of syllable names that is the product of cultural activities that interfere with the judgment of pitch change.

This article proposes that the representation of concepts in infancy is in the form of spatial image-schemas. A mechanism that simplifies spatial information is described along with a small set of spatial primitives that are sufficient to account for the conceptualizations that preverbal infants use to interpret objects and events. This early system is important to understand because it organizes the adult conceptual system of objects and events and remains its core. With development, the system becomes enriched by language in several ways, and also by means of analogical extension to non-spatial information. Nonspatial bodily information, such as feelings of force and motor activity, is also added, but remains secondary. It becomes associated with spatial representations, but except for its spatial aspects is represented in a more inchoate and less accessible fashion.

Theories of spatial cognition are derived from many sources. Psychologists are concerned with determining the features of the mind which, in combination with external inputs, produce our spatialized experience. A review of philosophical and other approaches has convinced us that the brain must come equipped to impose a three-dimensional Euclidean framework on experience – our analysis suggests that object re-identification may require such a framework. We identify this absolute, nonegocentric, spatial framework with a specific neural system centered in the hippocampus.

A consideration of the kinds of behaviours in which such a spatial mapping system would be important is followed by an analysis of the anatomy and physiology of this system, with special emphasis on the place-coded neurons recorded in the hippocampus of freely moving rats. A tentative physiological model for the hippocampal cognitive map is proposed. A review of lesion studies, in tasks as diverse as discrimination learning, avoidance, and extinction, shows that the cognitive map notion can adequately explain much of the data.

The model is extended to humans by the assumption that spatial maps are built in one hemisphere, semantic maps in the other. The latter provide a semantic deep structure within which discourse comprehension and production can be achieved. Evidence from the study of amnesic patients, briefly reviewed, is consistent with this extension.

Fundamental to spatial knowledge in all species are the representations underlying object recognition, object search, and navigation through space. But what sets humans apart from other species is our ability to express spatial experience through language. This target article explores the language of objects and places, asking what geometric properties are preserved in the representations underlying object nouns and spatial prepositions in English. Evidence from these two aspects of language suggests there are significant differences in the geometric richness with which objects and places are encoded. When an object is named (i.e., with count nouns), detailed geometric properties – principally the object's shape (axes, solid and hollow volumes, surfaces, and parts) – are represented. In contrast, when an object plays the role of either “figure” (located object) or “ground” (reference object) in a locational expression, only very coarse geometric object properties are represented, primarily the main axes. In addition, the spatial functions encoded by spatial prepositions tend to be nonmetric and relatively coarse, for example, “containment,” “contact,” “relative distance,” and “relative direction.” These properties are representative of other languages as well. The striking differences in the way language encodes objects versus places lead us to suggest two explanations: First, there is a tendency for languages to level out geometric detail from both object and place representations. Second, a nonlinguistic disparity between the representations of “what” and “where” underlies how language represents objects and places. The language of objects and places converges with and enriches our understanding of corresponding spatial representations.

We argue that a map is meaningless unless we have a process for using it. Thus, in this paper, we not only offer the world graph as a representation of relationships among situations the animal has encountered and may encounter again, but we also offer algorithms for how the information encoded in the world graph may be used by the animal in determining its behavior. Each node of the graph encodes a recognizable situation in the animal's world, but a given place may well be encoded in a number of different nodes. Nodes not only require algorithms for the recognition of the situation; they store information about drive reduction associated with the encoded situation. We note that the use of graphs as a basis for exploring some search space is well known in artificial intelligence (AI), but we stress the importance of the animal's exploration of its environment for growing the graph, as distinct from the mathematically described potential nodes frequent in AI search spaces. To explore a number of hypotheses about the way information in the world graph is used to guide the animal's movement, we recall a number of classical experiments on maze exploration by animals, and use them to argue for the nonlocal hypothesis (selection of a path does not depend only upon information about the immediate environment of the animal) and the competing nodes hypothesis (more than one drive may enter into the determination of the animal's behavior at any time). An important feature of the model is that it yields exploration and latent learning without the introduction of an exploratory drive. We also note that the performance exhibited by the model appears to be state-dependent when the animal operates under high drive levels. The drive-interaction matrix is offered as a subject for future research.

We complement the presentation of the world graph model, its drive dynamics, and how these are constrained by experiments on maze behavior, with a brief analysis of maps in the brain. We distinguish egocentric maps–which we relate to the many visual systems–from allocentric maps. We offer a somewhat unconventional view of short-term and long-term memory. We examine cooperative computation in somatotopically organized networks, relating this to visually guided behavior in the frog, and to the interaction of colliculus and cortex in the control of eye movements. We examine, but do not advocate, the hypothesis that the hippocampus is a cognitive map. We do stress that if it is a cognitive map, it must be seen as a chart of the local neighborhood, rather than the whole atlas; and we note that the cognitive map hypothesis would lead one to expect the region to exhibit activation of place cells before the animal leaves the previous place.

Patients with corticobasal degeneration (CBG) often demonstrate agraphesthesia in the same hand they demonstrate apraxia. To recognize letters written in their hand subjects can develop a spatial representation and access graphemic representations. Alternatively, people can use movement working memory and match movement patterns to stored letter movement representations. To learn the method normally used without vision, normal subjects (12) had letters written on their palm either in the normal manner or in a reverse direction. If letters written on the hand are recognized by their spatial features (as when visually reading) direction should not influence letter recognition, but if letters written on the hand are recognized by movement patterns, then in the reverse condition recognition should be impaired. When letters were written normally there were no differences in error between the tactile and visual modality. When letters were written in reverse, however, normal subjects made more errors in the tactile than visual condition. Normally, people identify letters written on their hand by covertly copying (mirroring) the examiner and then access letter movement representations. This might explain why patients with CBG often have agraphesthesia associated with apraxia. (JINS, 2010, 16, 190–193.)

Recent research has demonstrated some beneficial effects in patients with neglect using rightward shifting prismatic lenses. Despite a great deal of research exploring this effect, we know very little about the cognitive mechanisms underlying prism adaptation in neglect. We examined the possibility that prism adaptation influences visual attention by having healthy participants complete either a reflexive or a voluntary covert visual attention cuing paradigm before and after adaptation to leftward, rightward, or sham (no shift) prisms. The results for reflexive orienting demonstrated that a subset of participants with large cuing effects before prism adaptation were faster to reorient attention away from an invalid cue on the side of space opposite the prismatic shift post adaptation. For voluntary orienting, left prisms increased the efficiency of voluntary attention in both left and right visual space in participants with a small cuing effect before prism adaptation. In contrast, right prisms decreased the efficiency of voluntary attention in both left and right space for participants with a large cuing effect before prism adaptation. No significant effects were observed in the sham prism groups. These results suggest that prism adaptation may exert a variety of influences on attentional orienting mechanisms. (JINS, 2006, 12, 337–349.)