Speaker: Prof. Barbara Tversky, Professor of Psychology, Emerita, Stanford University; Professor of Psychology, Columbia Teachers College.

Time: 15:00-16:30, Oct. 28, 2019

Venue: Room 1113，Wang Kezhen Building

Abstract: All living things must move and act in space in order to survive. Spatial thinking, moving, acting, and interacting in space with the things around us, forms the foundation of all thought. Not the entire edifice but the foundation. Our minds go from idea to idea on conceptual paths just as our feet go from place to place on spatial paths. The same brain structures underlie both. Our minds act on ideas the way our hands act on objects, as reflected in the ways we talk and the gestures and graphics we create that help us to think and to communicate. We put the world in the mind, representing the three spaces crucial to action that are distorted by our action and perception. We organize the things we interact with in our minds and put that organization in the design of the world: categories, themes, hierarchies, orders, 1-1 correspondences, symmetries, and repetitions. The actions that underly thinking and designing get abstracted to gestures that help us think and communicate, the patterns get abstracted as graphics that do the same. Actions in space create abstractions: spraction.

Host: Prof. Fang Fang

2019-10-21