Browsing Bergen Open Research Archive by Author "Bender, Andrea"

Now showing items 1-20 of 20

    • Agents and patients in physical settings: Linguistic cues affect the assignment of causality in German and Tongan 

      Bender, Andrea; Beller, Sieghard (Peer reviewed; Journal article, 2017-07-07)
      Linguistic cues may be considered a potent tool for focusing attention on causes or effects. In this paper, we explore how different cues affect causal assignments in German and Tongan. From a larger screening study, two ...

    • Being in front is good—but where is in front? Preferences for spatial referencing affect evaluation 

      Bender, Andrea; Teige-Mocigemba, Sarah; Rothe-Wulf, Annelie; Seel, Miriam; Beller, Sieghard (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2020)
      Speakers of English frequently associate location in space with valence, as in moving up and down the “social ladder.” If such an association also holds for the sagittal axis, an object “in front of” another object would ...

    • Causal inferences about others' behavior among the Wampar, Papua New Guinea - and why they are hard to elicit 

      Beer, Bettina; Bender, Andrea (Peer reviewed; Journal article, 2015-03-10)
      As social beings, people need to be able to interact intelligently with others in their social environment. Accordingly, people spend much time conversing with one another in order to understand the broad and fine aspects ...

    • The Cultural Challenge in Mathematical Cognition 

      Beller, Sieghard; Bender, Andrea; Chrisomalis, Stephen; Jordan, Fiona M.; Overmann, Karenleigh A.; Saxe, Geoffrey B.; Schlimm, Dirk (Peer reviewed; Journal article, 2018)
      In their recent paper on “Challenges in mathematical cognition”, Alcock and colleagues (Alcock et al. [2016]. Challenges in mathematical cognition: A collaboratively-derived research agenda. Journal of Numerical Cognition, ...

    • The cultural fabric of human causal cognition 

      Bender, Andrea; Beller, Sieghard (Peer reviewed; Journal article, 2019)
      Causal cognition emerges early in development and confers an important advantage for survival. But does this mean that it is universal in humans? Our cross-disciplinary review suggests a broad evolutionary basis for core ...

    • Editors’ Review and Introduction: The Cultural Evolution of Cognition 

      Beller, Sieghard; Bender, Andrea; Jordan, Fiona (Peer reviewed; Journal article, 2020)
      This topic addresses a question of key interest to cognitive science, namely which factors may have triggered, constrained, or shaped the course of cognitive evolution. It highlights the relevance of culture as a driving ...

    • Flexibility in adopting relative frames of reference in dorsal and lateral settings. 

      Wilke, Fiona; Bender, Andrea; Beller, Sieghard (Peer reviewed; Journal article, 2019)
      The relative frame of reference (FoR) is used to describe spatial relations between two objects from an observer’s perspective. Standard, frontal referencing situations with objects located in the observer’s visual field ...

    • Gender congruency from a neutral point of view: The roles of gender classes and conceptual connotations 

      Bender, Andrea; Beller, Sieghard; Klauer, Karl Christoph (Peer reviewed; Journal article, 2018)
      The question of whether language affects thought is long-standing, with grammatical gender being one of the most contended instances. Empirical evidence focuses on the gender congruency effect, according to which referents ...

    • How contrast situations affect the assignment of causality in symmetric physical settings 

      Beller, Sieghard; Bender, Andrea (Peer reviewed; Journal article, 2015-01-08)
      In determining the prime cause of a physical event, people often weight one of two entities in a symmetric physical relation as more important for bringing about the causal effect than the other. In a broad survey (Bender ...

    • Knowledge is belief – and shaped by culture 

      Bender, Andrea; Gatewood, John B. (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2021)
      Phillips and colleagues claim that the representation of knowledge is more basic than the representation of belief, presupposing them to be categorically distinct mental states with distinct evolutionary purposes. We argue ...

    • Language and thought 

      Bender, Andrea (Chapter; Peer reviewed, 2019)
      According to the principle of linguistic relativity, most prominently proposed by Whorf, the language we speak affects the way we think. Three theses are central to this account: that languages differ in how they describe ...

    • Mushrooms as 'food for thought': Cognitive science perspectives on fungi 

      Papa, Aliki; Bender, Andrea; Sawada, Akiko; Oterhals, Åge; Kaaronen, Roope; Parise, André Geremia (Journal article, 2023)

    • The perception of quantity ain’t number: Missing the primacy of symbolic reference 

      Núñez, Rafael; d'Errico, Francesco; Gray, Russell D.; Bender, Andrea (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2021)
      Clarke and Beck's defense of the theoretical construct “approximate number system” (ANS) is flawed in serious ways – from biological misconceptions to mathematical naïveté. The authors misunderstand behavioral/psychological ...

    • The role of culture and evolution for human cognition 

      Bender, Andrea (Peer reviewed; Journal article, 2019-08-08)
      Since the emergence of our species at least, natural selection based on genetic variation has been replaced by culture as the major driving force in human evolution. It has made us what we are today, by ratcheting up ...

    • Turn around to have a look? Spatial referencing in dorsal versus frontal settings in cross-linguistic comparison 

      Beller, Sieghard; Singmann, Henrik; Hüther, Lisa; Bender, Andrea (Peer reviewed; Journal article, 2015-09-02)
      When referring to an object in relation to another, speakers of many languages can adopt a relative frame of reference (FoR). Following Levinson (2003), this kind of FoR can be established by projecting an observer’s ...

    • The value of diversity in cognitive science 

      Bender, Andrea (Peer reviewed; Journal article, 2019)
      A recent article (Núñez et al., 2019) claims that cognitive science, while starting off as a multidisciplinary enterprise, has “failed to transition to a mature inter‐disciplinary coherent field.” Two indicators reported ...

    • Variability in the alignment of number and space across languages and tasks 

      Bender, Andrea; Rothe-Wulf, Annelie; Beller, Sieghard (Peer reviewed; Journal article, 2018-10-04)
      While the domains of space and number appear to be linked in human brains and minds, their conceptualization still differs across languages and cultures. For instance, frames of reference for spatial descriptions vary ...

    • Ways of counting in Micronesia 

      Bender, Andrea; Beller, Sieghard (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2021)
      In many languages in Micronesia, clever ways of extending their counting systems to numbers far beyond imagination were developed in precolonial times. Here, we provide an exhaustive overview of these systems, highlight ...

    • What Early Sapiens Cognition Can Teach Us: Untangling Cultural Influences on Human Cognition Across Time 

      Bender, Andrea (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2020)
      Evidence of cultural influences on cognition is accumulating, but untangling these cultural influences from one another or from non-cultural influences has remained a challenging task. As between-group differences are ...

    • What Is Causal Cognition? 

      Bender, Andrea (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2020)
      While gaining an understanding of cause-effect relations is the key goal of causal cognition, its components are less clearly delineated. Standard approaches in the field focus on how individuals detect, learn, and reason ...