Perceptual similarity was examined in a remote culture and compared to that of Western observers. Similarity was assessed in a relative size judgement task and in an odd-one-out detection task. Thus, we examined the effects of culture on what might be considered low-level visual abilities. For both tasks, we found that performance was affected by stimuli that were culturally relevant to the tasks. In Experiment 1, we showed that the use of cow stimuli instead of the standard circles increased illusory (...) strength for the Himba. In Experiment 2, only the Himba showed more accurate detection based on category differences in the displays. It is argued that that Categorical Perception in Experiment 2, based on its presumed Whorfian origins, was the more reliable procedure for examining the effects of culture on perception. (shrink)

Goldstein (1948) reported multiple cases of failure to categorise colours in patients that he termed amnesic or anomic aphasics. these patients have a particular difficulty in producing perceptual categories in the absence of other aphasic impairments. we hold that neuropsychological evidence supports the view that the task of colour categorisation is logically impossible without labels.

The question of whether colour categorisation is determined by nontrivial constraints (i.e., universal neurophysiological properties of visual neurons) is an empirical issue concerning the organisation of the internal colour space. Rosch has provided psychological evidence that categories are organised around focal colours and that the organisation is universal; this commentary reconsiders that evidence.

Evidence from aphasia is considered that leads to a distinction between abstract and concrete thought processes and hence for a distinction between rules and similarity. It is argued that perceptual classification is inherently a rule-following procedure and these rules are unable to be followed when a patient has difficulty with name comprehension and retrieval.

This paper engages in an overdue dialogue amongst some aspects of the thinking of Maria Zambrano and psychoanalytic theory. The discussion focuses on some epistemological and phenomenological ideas that were prevalent in twentieth-century European philosophy. The notion of the real, for instance, is one of the jambs of this comparison, particularly between Zambrano and Jacques Lacan’s ideas. Reflecting upon how Zambrano, Lacan and Freud characterised the origins and limits of the subject and language is testimony of these problems and limits (...) themselves. Division, traversement, schism and exile are distinct yet similar heterogeneities that are central in the thinking of these authors. The Zambranian schism between philosophy and poetry, where pathos and logos are divided, resembles the psychoanalytic understood schism between the psychic and bodily and recalls the problems of the Freudian pleasure principle. These schisms can in turn be understood as an exile of a mythical prelinguistic unity which is best characterised by Lacan as the fundamental castration of the subject of desire. The psychoanalytic reflection upon Zambrano’s writing itself opens possibilities for future dialogues, perhaps in terms of a sinthomatic savoir-faire, which offers yet another layer to the discussion of her remarkable life and work. (shrink)