Resumo

LIMONGI TIRADO, Roberto. The role of linguistic processing and primary visualcortex in the perception of cause-effect relations. Letras [online]. 2006, vol.48, n.73, pp.349-363. ISSN 0459-1283.

In this work, we addressed whether perceptual causality lays on sensory information or requires further linguistic processing. We developed an experiment in which subjects judged lexical-causative or periphrastic-causative sentences as describing visual stimuli culturally considered as causal. Results of this experiment led to set up an artificial neural network model that simulates neuron-like units of the associative visual cortex, and we assessed the amount of variance the model could account for. Experiment’s results yielded that subjects used specific syntactic structures when describing direct and indirect causal events. On the other hand, the computerized model only explained up to 22% of the variance of the data. We evaluated such a weakness under the scope of recent cognitive neuroscience research, and we concluded that higher cortical regions involved in linguistic processing and attention might account for the remaining 78% of the variance.

Palavras-chave : perceptual causality; language and causality; computational modeling.