The Literary Mind.pdf

24 THE LITERARY MIND
experiential selection and reentry during encounters with a great variety of things
that gradually came to be categorized as containers exactly because we take them
to share this dynamic interactional image schema. The image schema itself needs
no translation: it is meaningful, when activated, as corresponding to this category.
It would be a mistake to overwork or overinterpret these beginning results.
It is not clear how to connect the evidence for image schemas in the study of the
mind to the evidence for image schemas in the study of the brain. Perhaps the
neurobiological analogue of an image schema is not one neuronal group pattern
but rather the complex interaction of several neuronal group patterns in different
sites, all coordinated. The best evidence to date of the specific nature of image
schemas still comes from the study of language.
IMAGE SCHEMAS IN BASIC-LEVEL CATEGORIES. Outside the neurosciences,
psychological studies are beginning to provide evidence for the role of image
schemas in categorization and cognition. Psychologists Eleanor Rosch and
Carolyn Mervis and a range of associates have made insightful discoveries in the
last fifteen years concerning the conceptual categories of concrete objects. Rosch
and her colleagues showed that there is one level of abstraction around which
most information is organized. They call it the "basic" level—the level of concepts
like dog, table, car, tree, house, bicycle, spoon, and giraffe. The basic level,
essentially, is the level at which we partition our environments into objects with
which we interact in small spatial stories: chair, door, knife, ball, rock. Rosch presents
evidence that the basic level is the highest level at which category members
share overall perceived shapes and the highest level at which members call for
similar interactional motor patterns. Since these overall shapes and these interactional
patterns are image schemas, Rosch's work provides evidence for the role
of image schemas in structuring perceptual and conceptual categories. Although
the tradition of research on "basic-level" categories is controversial, none of the
controversy detracts from this essential point.
IMAGE SCHEMAS IN DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY. In a 1992 article in
Psychological Review called "How to Build a Baby: II. Conceptual Primitives,"
Jean Mandler presents evidence for image schemas from clinical experiments in
developmental psychology. She claims that infants develop concepts of animacy
and agency on the basis of image schemas. The image schemas she proposes are
closely equivalent to those we have considered above.
Mandler attempts to explain how the developing infant might go from forming
discriminable perceptual categories to using them for thought. She proposes
that certain kinds of perceptual information are receded into forms that represent
meanings. This receding produces a set of image schemas that serve as con-