Corballis Michael C
School of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
Cogn Process. 2018 Sep;19(Suppl 1):89-92. doi: 10.1007/s10339-018-0878-1.
Cognition is heavily grounded in space. As animals that move in space, we travel both physically and mentally in space and time, reliving past events, imagining future ones, and even constructing imaginary scenarios that play out in stories. Mental exploration of space is extraordinarily flexible, allowing us to zoom, adopt different vantage points, mentally rotate, and attach objects and sense impressions to create events, whether remembered, planned, or simply invented. The properties of spatiotemporal cognition depend on a hippocampal-entorhinal circuit of place cells, grid cells and border cells, with combinations of grid-cell modules generating a vast number of potential spatial remappings. The generativity of language, often considered one of its defining properties, may therefore derive not from the nature of language itself, but rather from the generativity of spatiotemporal scenarios, with language having evolved as a means of sharing them. Much our understanding of the hippocampal-entorhinal circuit is derived from neurophysiological recording in the rat brain, implying that the spatiotemporal cognition underpinning language has a long evolutionary history.
认知在很大程度上扎根于空间。作为在空间中移动的动物，我们在空间和时间中进行身体和精神上的旅行，重温过去的事件，想象未来的事件，甚至构建在故事中展开的虚构场景。对空间的心理探索非常灵活，使我们能够缩放、采用不同的有利位置、进行心理旋转，并将物体和感官印象联系起来以创造事件，无论是记忆中的、计划中的还是仅仅虚构的。时空认知的特性取决于由位置细胞、网格细胞和边界细胞组成的海马-内嗅回路，网格细胞模块的组合产生了大量潜在的空间重映射。因此，语言的生成性，通常被认为是其定义特性之一，可能并非源于语言本身的性质，而是源于时空场景的生成性，语言是作为分享这些场景的一种手段而进化而来的。我们对海马-内嗅回路的许多理解都来自于对大鼠大脑的神经生理学记录，这意味着支撑语言的时空认知有着悠久的进化历史。
