Scholars@Duke
Charles Davis

Charles Davis

Postdoctoral Associate
Psychology & Neuroscience
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Selected Publications

A context-sensitive and non-linguistic approach to abstract concepts.

Journal Article Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · February 2023 Despite the recent upsurge in research on abstract concepts, there remain puzzles at the foundation of their empirical study. These are most evident when we consider what is required to assess a person's abstract conceptual abilities without using language ... Full text Cite

Emergence of Covid‐19 as a Novel Concept Shifts Existing Semantic Spaces

Journal Article Cognitive Science · January 2023 AbstractConceptual knowledge is dynamic, fluid, and flexible, changing as a function of contextual factors at multiple scales. The Covid‐19 pandemic can be considered a large‐scale, global context that has fundamentally alt ... Full text Open Access Cite

Is time an embodied property of concepts?

Journal Article PloS one · January 2023 A haircut usually lasts under an hour. But how long does it take to recognize that something is an instance of a haircut? And is this "time-to-perceive" a part of the representation of concepts like haircut? Across three experiments testing lexical decisio ... Full text Cite

Encoding and inhibition of arbitrary episodic context with abstract concepts.

Journal Article Memory & cognition · April 2022 Context is critical for conceptual processing, but the mechanism underpinning its encoding and reinstantiation during abstract concept processing is unclear. Context may be especially important for abstract concepts-we investigated whether episodic context ... Full text Cite

Autism-spectrum traits in neurotypicals predict the embodiment of manipulation knowledge about object concepts: Evidence from eyetracking.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2022 Sensorimotor-based theories of cognition predict that even subtle developmental motor differences, such as those characterizing autism spectrum disorder (ASD), impact how we represent the meaning of manipulable objects (e.g., faucet). Here, we test 85 neur ... Full text Cite

Building semantic memory from embodied and distributional language experience.

Journal Article Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · September 2021 Humans seamlessly make sense of a rapidly changing environment, using a seemingly limitless knowledgebase to recognize and adapt to most situations we encounter. This knowledgebase is called semantic memory. Embodied cognition theories suggest that we repr ... Full text Cite

Variability in the analysis of a single neuroimaging dataset by many teams.

Journal Article Nature · June 2020 Data analysis workflows in many scientific domains have become increasingly complex and flexible. Here we assess the effect of this flexibility on the results of functional magnetic resonance imaging by asking 70 independent teams to analyse the same datas ... Full text Link to item Cite

Language as a mental travel guide.

Journal Article The Behavioral and brain sciences · June 2020 Gilead et al.'s approach to human cognition places abstraction and prediction at the heart of "mental travel" under a "representational diversity" perspective that embraces foundational concepts in cognitive science. But, it gives insufficient credit to th ... Full text Cite

Making It Harder to "See" Meaning: The More You See Something, the More Its Conceptual Representation Is Susceptible to Visual Interference.

Journal Article Psychological science · May 2020 Does the perceptual system for looking at the world overlap with the conceptual system for thinking about it? We conducted two experiments (N = 403) to investigate this question. Experiment 1 showed that when people make simple semantic judgments on ... Full text Cite

Situational systematicity: A role for schema in understanding the differences between abstract and concrete concepts.

Journal Article Cognitive neuropsychology · February 2020 concepts differ from concrete concepts in several ways. Here, we focus on what we refer to as situational systematicity: The objects and relations that constitute an abstract concept (e.g., justice) are more dispersed through space and time t ... Full text Cite

What Does a Horgous Look Like? Nonsense Words Elicit Meaningful Drawings

Journal Article Cognitive Science · October 2019 AbstractTo what extent do people attribute meanings to “nonsense” words? How general is such attribution of meaning? We used a set of words lacking conventional meanings to elicit drawings of made‐up creatures. Se ... Full text Cite