English language and linguistics research seminar: Ivana Bianchi, University of Macerata: Opposites in perception, creative reasoning, and art appreciation

In this presentation, I will address the topic of opposites referencing three main areas.

Firstly, I will invite you to reflect on the importance of opposites not only with regard to language but also to perception and cognition. Evidence of the ease with which we perceive opposites and think in opposites emerges from informal observations and scientific studies. These studies have demonstrated that opposites are a primal configuration in language and meaning (e.g.  Gärdenfors, 2014; Jones, 2007; Paradis, 2016; Paradis & Willners, 2011), that people have an intuitive idea of what constitutes the opposite of a figure (e.g. Bianchi & Burro, 2023), or of a posture or gesture (e.g. Bianchi et al. 2014; Bianchi & Savardi, 2008), or transformation (e.g. Bianchi et al., 2021; Capitani et al., 2020). Opposites have also been proven to be widely used in thinking (e.g. Branchini et al., 2021; Byrne, 2018; Oaksford, 2002) and to be an effective tool to overcome fixedness in problem solving (e.g. Bianchi et al. 2020) and in tasks testing hypotheses (e.g. Branchini et al. 2023; Gale & Ball, 2012), and it has been suggested that they might also support creative thinking in general (Bianchi & Branchini, 2023). 

Within this broad framework, the second and third parts of this presentation will focus more in detail on two studies. One is situated at the interface between Cognitive Semantics and Experimental Phenomenology. This study was carried out in collaboration with colleagues at Lund University. We investigated whether and how the perceptual structure of opposites (i.e. the two poles and the intermediate region comprising what is experienced as neither one pole nor the opposite) varies across different sensory modalities: vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste. 

The study I will introduce in the third part of the presentation was conducted in collaboration with colleagues at the Universities of Verona and Padua, Italy, and Pennsylvania, the US, with the aim of investigating whether non experts’ aesthetic appreciation of modern and contemporary artworks could be improved if observers think of the creative elements in the artworks in terms of opposites, that is, for example, with respect to standard, more traditional ideas or the more usual function of an object. We expected that looking at things in this new way increases the level of interest experienced by non-expert adults when looking at artworks and also enhance their experience in a similar way as information about art history does. 

The results and some possible future developments of a comprehensive approach to opposites within the Cognitive Sciences will be discussed at the end of the presentation.