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Recent cognitive science research suggests that occasional “blindness” to choice manipulations indicates a lack of awareness in choice making. This claim is based on participants’ tendency not to detect choice manipulations and the similarity between their justifications for choices they made and those they were tricked into believing they made. Using a cognitive-semiotic framework, we argue that such conclusions underestimate the embodied, intersubjective nature of human meaning-making. We support this by investigating choice awareness beyond language to include non-verbal behavior. Forty-one participants were asked to choose from pairs of photographs of human faces the one they found most attractive and then to justify their choices, without knowing that for some of the trials they were asked to justify a choice that they had not made. Verbal responses were categorized as (i) non-manipulated, (ii) detected manipulated, and (iii) undetected manipulated trials. Bodily expressions, assessed using five different Categories of Bodily Expression (CBE): Adaptors, Torso, Head, Face and Hand expressions, revealed differences in: (a) duration, (b) rates of occurrence and (c) variety of the CBEs across trials. Thus, even when manipulations were not verbally detected, participants took longer to assess choices, showed increased bodily expressions, and engaged more body parts in undetected manipulations compared to non-manipulated choice trials. This suggests a degree of awareness to the choice manipulation, even if pre-reflective, manifested in participants’ bodily expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of (im)politeness studies has been steadily growing and developing but the role of conventionality and the type of semiotic system (e.g., language vs. gesture) for impoliteness perception has not been sufficiently explored. We used a cognitive-semiotic framework combining a reaction-time experiment and in-depth interviews with sixty participants to explore how Russian and Swedish native speakers evaluate and describe highly and less conventional impolite behaviour expressed either through speech or through gesture. The results showed a positive correlation between the conventionality of expressions and how impolite they are judged to be, and that highly conventional expressions lead to faster judgements. Few differences were found between impolite expressions in the experiment, but some were reflected in the interviews. Further, we found that Swedish participants evaluated language and gestures as very impolite more often than Russian participants did. We discuss these findings through the lens of the proposed framework and offer a three-dimensional analysis of the concept of conventionality in terms of frequency, normativity, and encodedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a cognitive semiotic case study of the narrative potential of the statue Den lille Havfrue ('the little mermaid') by Edvard Eriksen in Copenhagen. On the basis of theoretical analysis and a survey in which 20 European and 19 Chinese participants replied to questions concerning this statue we argue that it, and similar statues, may be considered as products of intersemiotic translation, but only if we dispense with any requirements of "equivalence" between source and target, since statues are necessarily semiotically highly reduced. While the source narratives constitute cases of primary narrativity, with narrations providing the audiences with stories, statues may partake only of secondary narrativity, where a prior story is needed for the statue to be understood as narration. In our study, this was reflected by correlations between reported prior knowledge and narrative (and possibly even non-narrative) interpretations of Den lille Havfrue. Finally, we relate the discussion to present-day cultural and political "settings", where many statues, including Den lille Havfrue, have become part of a global anti-racism narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]