Cultural models mediating between visual sensation and semiotic systems, exemplified on visual, alpha-pictorial and verbal-gestural communication

Abstract

People often see what they want to see (or hear, or taste, etc.), i.e., our mind imperceptibly edits our actual sensations. Culture may function, metaphorically speaking, as a pair of glasses that filters light, because it may be tinted, or have different lenses. In this article we study how visual sensations are filtered and edited, either reduced or enriched, so as to produce perceptions fitting the cultural models we have, and how this interaction is reflected in semiotic systems, i.e., in visual, multimodal, and verbal-gestural communication. Accordingly, we offer three case studies in which we demonstrate the claim that variably articulated cultural models (often networks of related cultural models) we have influence whether, and how, we experience something as being of metaphorical or metonymic nature.