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Poster Session B: Wednesday, August 13, 1:00 – 4:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Working Memory Integrates Geometrical and Temporal Languages of Thought

Elyes Tabbane¹, Fosca Al Roumi; ¹France Learning Planet Institute

Presenter: Elyes Tabbane

Human cognitive uniqueness is often attributed to the language faculty (Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch, 2002) that is, a set of abilities supporting speech internally (as thoughts) and externally (in communication). However, natural speech is not the only uniquely human ability, and the properties that support it might not be all there is to human cognitive singularity. In fact, our capacities for music, mathematics and other structured domains have been proposed to rely on a faculty to produce and make use of mental programs that efficiently capture the regularities in our environment to create compressed internal representations (Dehaene et al., 2022). These mental programs rely on a set of internal languages that can combine symbols based on rules and syntactically organize them to create structured expressions, this has been called the Language of Thoughts (LoTs) hypothesis (Fodor, 1975, Dehaene et al., 2022). However, it remains unclear how different LoTs interact to form shared mental representations. We investigate this gap using two behavioral experiments : (1) complexity ratings and (2) delayed sequence reproduction. We show that sequences combining geometrical and temporal regularities, and thus engaging two LoTs, are both judged simpler and remembered more efficiently than those using a single LoT.

Topic Area: Language & Communication

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