Arthur M. Glenberg - Ph.D., 1974, University of Michigan
Department of Psychology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, WI 53706
email:glenberg@wisc.edu
phone: 608-262-8992
office: 420 Psychology, 1202 W. Johnson St., Madison, WI 53706
Selected Laboratory Publications
Active Grants
NSF Continuing grant, August 1, 2003 - July 31, 2005 (Estimated)
"Perception and Action Systems in High-Level Cognition"
NSF Standard grant, April 15, 2005 - March 31, 2006 (Estimated)
"Symbols, Embodiment, and Meaning: A Workshop and Debate"
NSF Standard grant, January 1, 2003 - June 30, 2006 (Estimated)
"US-Germany Cooperative Research:
Embodied Processing of Verbal and Numerical Information"
US DOE Cognition and Student Learning Research Program grant
"Training indexing to enhance meaning extraction in young reader"
Grant abstracts
"Perception and Action Systems in High-Level Cognition"
Language conveys meaning but how so? At first the answer seems simple: One person talks while the other listens, and then they exchange roles. Understanding seems to boil down to the listener knowing the meaning of the spoken words plus some rules of grammar. But that is not the whole story. To understand language, people bring to bear memories of related interactions with objects in their world and with other people. It is as though they imagine, consciously or unconsciously, the situations described within the conversation-successful understanding is more closely tied to successful imagination than to grammatical analysis. Our research investigates these characteristics of language and imagination. For example, to understand the sentence "The strong wind caused the sailboat to capsize" may require a form of imagination in which an imagined wind exerts enough force to tip over the boat. This form of imagination may invoke the same processes of mind that would understand the perception of a sailboat capsized by a strong wind. Dr. Glenberg explores such possibilities using a newly developed procedure in which people press a lever while reading sentences that imply force in the opposite or same direction. The action of pressing makes it easier to read sentences that entail force in the same direction, or harder to read for forces in the opposite direction. This is interpreted as evidence that the same mental process is tapped in language and perception. Additional research examines the application of these ideas to languages other than English and to performance in non-linguistic domains such as mathematics. Broader impacts of this research are used to guide the design of reading remediation technologies and the creation of new types of educational tools.
"Symbols, Embodiment, and Meaning: A Workshop and Debate"
With support from the National Science Foundation and the Government of Spain, Symbols, Embodiment, and Meaning: A workshop and debate brings together some of the world's leading psychologists, philosophers, neuroscientists, and roboticists to address whether, or the extent to which, the meanings of words derived from the bodily experiences of human kind. For instance, the word "stand" is used metaphorical in ways that take into account the bodily experience of upright posture in a gravitational field (e.g., standoffish, stand your ground, take a stand, which emphasize force and balance). This issue has deep theoretical implications for the cognitive sciences and practical implications for the construction of interactive robots as well as the teaching of reading and mathematics. The 22 invited speakers (from the US and Europe) represent both sides of the debate about embodied meaning. Invited speakers prepare position papers that are distributed in advance to all attendees. Each morning and afternoon is devoted to a debate-like presentation of the positions followed by a discussion open to all attendees. In addition, approximately 40 doctoral and post-doctoral students will attend the debate and a poster session each day allows for the presentation of new empirical work by speakers and students. Intellectual merits of the workshop arise from the debate format designed to be a source of new theoretical ideas, collaborations, empirical tests, and interdisciplinary and international research. Broader impacts arise from the integration of research and education: Graduate students participate in the open discussions and present their research during the poster sessions. The results of the debate will be disseminated widely through the publication of a book and accompanying DVD documenting the debates and discussions.
"Embodied Processing of Verbal and Numerical Information"
This award supports the PI and graduate students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in a collaboration with Mike Rinck of the Institute for General Psychology at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany. The combined efforts of the German and US groups will test the hypothesis that understanding of language is action based and extends the hypothesis to the domain of numerical cognition. According to the theory, words and phrases are indexed to perceptual symbols or actual objects in the environment. Ultimately, understanding language is understanding the actions described to the implications for action in the situation described. Recent work has supported the hypothesis for English, and the present work will test it for German. This work has considerable implication for both basic and applied research. The project also has an educational objective. The project will allow the graduate students involved to benefit from performing research in another country. They will develop a heightened appreciation of the world around them while also learning important new technical skills.
"Training indexing to enhance meaning extraction in young reader"
Thirty-eight percent of U.S. 4th graders cannot read and understand a paragraph in a children's book, and the percentages for struggling minority students and students from low-income families are even higher. In this project the researchers are using advances in cognitive science and the study of language development to create and test an intervention to enhance young children's reading comprehension. The intervention is based on the Indexical Hypothesis, which theorizes that good readers associate words and phrases with objects and actions in the environment or mental images of objects and actions and use their ideas of these objects and images to make sense of what they are reading. The intervention is designed to teach children how to perform indexing, first with objects, and then with mental images. Children read texts describing a toy scenario arrayed in front of them (e.g., a farm scenario with a barn, animals, tractor, etc.), and, after reading a sentence, they manipulate the toys to correspond to the sentence. Following this manipulation training, children then learn to imagine manipulating (IM), in which they picture in their minds the objects and actions that a given sentence refers to. Training on the Indexical Hypothesis makes explicit that part of the reading process that requires the reader to link written words to what the words mean.
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