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Resumo

A small but important aspect of culture consists of shared cognitive representations of semantic structures that reside as localized functional units in the minds of individuals. In this article we discuss the cognitive and biological foundations for a model of culture as shared cognitive representations and summarize empirical evidence for predictions derived from the model. The structure of semantic domains such as the names of colors, animals, or kinship terms is defined as the arrangement of the terms relative to each other in a spatial model. In this space, items that are judged as more similar are placed closer to each other than items judged as less similar. Measuring the extent to which 'pictures' or cognitive representations in the mind of one person correspond to those in the mind of another, research on various semantic domains has demonstrated that typical members of a culture have similar 'pictures' in their minds.

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