New avenues into our multisensory world: Resonating organizational structures in perception, cognition, imagery and language

Summary in English Language and imagery enjoy central roles in the human sciences. They constitute the target of this research program whilst at the same time offering the means of probing into people’s minds. We investigate how humans engage with the rich multisensory world of vision, sound, taste, smell and touch, exploring questions such as: From where does our use of the same expressions across the senses (dark colours, dark tones), cognition (dark thoughts) and value system (DARK IS EVIL; LIGHT IS GOOD) emerge? Even though a great deal of research holds that thinking and communication are shaped by our sensory-motor and perceptual systems, very little is known about the way these systems interact with one another. To uncover such mysteries, this program proceeds from perception to imagery and language via cognition and back again. We focus on a core set of dimensions (e.g., LIGHT, LENGTH, TEMPERATURE) and construal operations (comparison, similarity, opposition) which we believe are structuring devices that reduce the complexity of multisensory experiences, and as such are important for problem solving and for the creation of meaning in communication. The program is an international, interdisciplinary, multi-method initiative between researchers in the language sciences and psychology. We share assumptions about the sensorial basis of language, imagery and cognition, at the same time as our research traditions contribute distinctive vantage points and methods to meet our research objectives.