Papers by Yasmina Jraissati
Shifting Concepts
It is agreed that colour categorization is context sensitive, and that context plays a role in wh... more It is agreed that colour categorization is context sensitive, and that context plays a role in why colour categories are the way they are. Yet, the way context is supposed to influence colour categorization is never spelled out in the literature, the focus of which has mostly been to identify mechanisms at play in colour categorization, either perceptual and cognitive or, alternatively, linguistic. This chapter steers away from the wealthy categorization literature, and takes a different starting point by asking the preliminary question of how we categorize colour in our everyday interactions. The answer to this question makes important use of the notion of colour space and subspace. It leads to a unified framework that makes room for context sensitivity, while also accounting for colour categorization.
Cognitive Science, 2021
Humans are poorer at identifying smells and communicating about them, compared to other sensory d... more Humans are poorer at identifying smells and communicating about them, compared to other sensory domains. They also cannot easily organize odor sensations in a general conceptual space, where geometric distance could represent how similar or different all odors are. These two generalities are more or less accepted by psychologists, and they are often seen as connected: If there is no conceptual space for odors, then olfactory identification should indeed be poor. We propose here an important revision to this conclusion: We believe that the claim that there is no odor space is true only if by odor space, one means a conceptual space representing all possible odor sensations, in the paradigmatic sense used for instance for color. However, in a less paradigmatic sense, local conceptual spaces representing a given subset of odors do exist. Thus the absence of a global odor space does not warrant the conclusion that there is no olfactory conceptual map at all. Here we show how a localist account provides a new interpretation of experts and cross-cultural categorization studies: Rather than being exceptions to the poor olfactory identification and communication usually seen elsewhere, experts and cross-cultural categorization are here taken to corroborate the existence of local conceptual spaces.
Progress in Colour Studies, 2018
Rivista di estetica, 2010
A widely held view on color cognition is that it is structured by a set of color fundamentals. Th... more A widely held view on color cognition is that it is structured by a set of color fundamentals. Three sorts of evidence may be invoked in favor of such a "foundational" approach to color cognition: physiological, phenomenal and lexical. This paper focuses on the lexical ...
Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally res... more Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhib...
Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2019
Are whales fish or mammals? Though the answer seems obvious today, it was not the case over a cen... more Are whales fish or mammals? Though the answer seems obvious today, it was not the case over a century ago: "The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the whales from the waters, he stated as follows: 'On account of their warm bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem" (…) I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether insufficient (…). Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old-fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me." (Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale, 1851, Ch. XXII, "Cetology", p.131) Whether a whale is categorized as a fish or a mammal is not a trivial terminological question. The way we categorize a given item determines the way in which we understand and predict its behavior. The extent to which categorization determines the way we relate to members of the category is debated. Whorf famously argued that depending on the way a given linguistic community categorizes snow, or depending on the way it categorizes time, members of the group would relate to snow and time differently (Whorf 1940; Whorf 1956). The consequences of cross-cultural differences in categorization, or of shifts in category extensions is a question that also arises in sensory categorization more specifically. There are cross-cultural disparities in the way we name and categorize some sensory experiences, suggesting that we represent them differently. Do we experience them differently as well? Do we experience things according to how we name them? Take the taste category "umami". Though tasted daily, this fifth so-called primary taste (along with bitter, sweet, salty and sour) remained unknown and unnamed until a Japanese researcher, discovered
Mind & Language, 2018
The terms and conditions for the reuse of this version of the manuscript are specified in the pub... more The terms and conditions for the reuse of this version of the manuscript are specified in the publishing policy. For all terms of use and more information see the publisher's website.
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2017
This chapter examines the method for reporting color in grapheme-color synesthesia and its conseq... more This chapter examines the method for reporting color in grapheme-color synesthesia and its consequences. The Berlin and Kay basic color categories typology is sometimes used, but one should wonder whether such a simplification is justified, and whether it might not have important theoretical implications for our understanding of synesthesia. In this chapter, such implications are uncovered. A discussion opposing Simner and colleagues to Beeli and colleagues regarding the linguistic vs/color appearance bias of grapheme-color associations is taken as an illustration. Essentially, it is argued that the Berlin and Kay typology is misused, leading to dangerous tensions, and that the assumed relation between color appearance, categories, and terms is not clear. In conclusion, the chapter suggests how research in color categorization can offer alternative frameworks to understand grapheme-color synesthesia, and notes that work in synesthesia can also shed light on color categorization.
Multisensory Research, 2017
This study investigated cross-modal associations between color and touch using a matching task. P... more This study investigated cross-modal associations between color and touch using a matching task. Participants matched colors drawn from the surface of the Munsell color solid to antonym pairs of haptic/tactile adjectives. For most of the term pairs assessed (soft/hard,smooth/rough,flat/uneven,slippery/not slippery,light/heavy,thin/thickandround/sharp) matching appears predominantly influenced by lightness, with the first term from each pair matched to light colors and the other to dark colors, a result in close agreement with previous research. For two terms,warmandwet, there were clear influences of hue on task performance. There were also similarities between patterns of color matching to several of the haptic/tactile terms assessed and color matching to another term,dislike. This suggests valence may play a mediating role in cross-modal associations involving touch and color.
Noûs, 2017
And finally to see if responses to Knowledge Attribution are due to protagonist projection, we as... more And finally to see if responses to Knowledge Attribution are due to protagonist projection, we asked: Strict Knowledge Attribution: In your personal opinion, which of the following sentences better describes Bob's situation? [Bob knows the bank will be open on Saturday./Bob thinks he knows the bank will be open on Saturday, but he doesn't actually know it will be open.] 1
Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, 2017
Is behavioral integration (i.e., which occurs when a subject’s assertion that p matches her nonve... more Is behavioral integration (i.e., which occurs when a subject’s assertion that p matches her nonverbal behavior) a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data fromover 5,000 people across 26 samples, spanning 22 countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we argue that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, nonlinguistic behavioral evidence is disregarded. In light of this, we take ourselves to have discovered a universal principle governing the ascription of beliefs in folk psychology.
Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 2017
This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a tru... more This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong-Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage in "reflective" thinking.
Philosophical Psychology, 2013
For over a century, the question of the relation of language to thought has been extensively disc... more For over a century, the question of the relation of language to thought has been extensively discussed in the case of color categorization, where two main views prevail. The relativist view claims that color categories are relative while the universalistic view argues that color categories are universal. Relativists also argue that color categories are linguistically determined, and universalists that they are perceptually determined. Recently, the argument for the perceptual determination of color categorization has been undermined, and the relativist view has regained some ground. This paper argues that although the universalistic account of color categorization has been called into question, this is not enough to establish relativism. Color categories can still be said to be universal or particular, independent of the accounts of their universality or relativity. Because of its polarization, the debate has disregarded some issues that are key in our understanding of color categorization: the question of what a color category is and how to identify it.
Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2015
The objective of the present study was to explore cross-modal associations between color and tact... more The objective of the present study was to explore cross-modal associations between color and tactile sensation while using haptically rendered virtual stimuli with substance properties of roughness/smoothness, hardness/softness, heaviness/lightness, elasticity/inelasticity, and adhesiveness/ nonadhesiveness. The stimuli with the indicated properties were rendered with the aid of SensAble PHANTOM OMNI® haptic device. The experimental setup required the participants to use exploratory procedures typical to real object interaction, and select a color from the HSV color space that matched the experienced sensation. The findings of our investigation reveal systematic mapping between color characteristics and intensity of the haptic stimuli. Qualitatively different haptic sensations, however, produced relatively similar patterns of cross-modal associations.
Supplemental material, 20180620-SI-SeeingColors DelvingDeeper-DiscardedColors for Delving Deeper ... more Supplemental material, 20180620-SI-SeeingColors DelvingDeeper-DiscardedColors for Delving Deeper Into Color Space by Yasmina Jraissati and Igor Douven in i-Perception
Supplemental material, 20180620-SI-SeeingColors DelvingDeeper-ColorCoordinates for Delving Deeper... more Supplemental material, 20180620-SI-SeeingColors DelvingDeeper-ColorCoordinates for Delving Deeper Into Color Space by Yasmina Jraissati and Igor Douven in i-Perception
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Papers by Yasmina Jraissati