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Star realms frontiers difference11/28/2023 On the one hand, much of mainstream cognitive science often segregates perception from the rest of cognition (see Fodor, 1998 Pylyshyn, 1999 Burge, 2010 Block, 2014, 2018 Firestone and Scholl, 2016). Given that emotions exhibit facets of both non-cognitive processes ( Damasio, 1994, 2003 Oatley and Johnson-Laird, 2002 Zinck and Newen, 2008 Panksepp and Biven, 2012) and cognitive mechanisms ( Scherer, 1984 Ortony et al., 1988 Lazarus, 1991), any kind of emotion-perception homologies can help uncover the properties and aspects of convergences between cognition and perception at a fundamental level. Now we turn to the main issue.ĭespite representational and domain-specific differences between emotion and perceptual systems, there are some formal correspondences at the representational level between emotion and perception. When emotive/affective representations are expressed in natural language and assume the typical character of cognitive representations, we may call such representations linguistically encoded representations of emotion. Linguistic representations and perceptual representations refer, respectively, to cognitive representations coded in language and representations grounded in the sensory systems. Crucially, cognitive representations have been traditionally thought to be amodal, proposition-type representations in the mind ( Fodor and Pylyshyn, 1988) and are supposed to exclude sensory-motor and emotive/affective representations, although this is what is challenged in embodied theories of cognition (see Barsalou, 2008 Shapiro, 2019). Cognitive representations in this sense include experiences or conceptual representations that can be re-activated/triggered in an offline format (for example, experiences of rain that can be re-activated when there is no rain) and hence may draw upon neural resources across perceptual, motor, emotive/affective, linguistic, and other areas. By integrating the notions of representation and concepts in Connell and Lynott (2014), cognitive representations can be demarcated as specific, situated, contextually driven, or context-free structures and/or schemas that are realized as conglomerations of neural activation patterns for the interpretation and evaluation of objects, events, situations in the outer world, and include both online (part of current experience) and offline (not part of current experience) information. 1 At this point, it is essential to clarify the terminology to be used. This paper aims to offer a conceptual analysis of parallels and formal similarities between linguistic representations of emotion and perception, thereby offering a way of integrating perceptual representations and cognitive representations (especially linguistically encoded representations of emotion) for cognitive systems. This helps not only tie together perceptual and cognitive processes via the interface between language and emotive representations, but also reveal the limits of emotive representations in amalgamating perceptual and cognitive processes in cognitive systems. In this way, cognitive systems can be saliently tuned to the outer world by being motivated and also subtly governed by emotion-driven representations. It is these ordinary objects, events and things that provide the scaffolding for task-dependent or goal-oriented activities of cognitive systems including autonomous systems. It turns out that the types of linguistic representations of emotion that readily permit the desired unity of perception and cognition are exactly those that are linguistically encoded emotive representations of everyday objects, events, and things around us. In particular, this article shows that certain types of linguistic representations of emotion allow for the integration of perception and cognition through a series of steps and operations in cognitive systems, whereas certain other linguistic representations of emotion are not so representationally structured as to permit the unity of perception and cognition. Linguistic representations of emotions provide a fertile ground for explorations into the nature and form of integration of perception and cognition because emotion has facets of both perceptual and cognitive processes. This article will provide a unifying perspective on perception and cognition via the route of linguistic representations of emotion. Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Hyderabad, India.
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