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Meaning and motor action
Embodied theories posit that thoughts are perceptuo-motor simulations.
Abstract concepts present a challenge for these theories: how can we
perceptually simulate things we can never perceive? Novel
'motor-meaning congruity' tasks reveal that spatio-motoric schemas are
automatically activated during even shallow, incidental processing of
abstract words and
pictures.
Neural correlates of spatio-motor schemas
What is the nature of these spatio-motor representations? Motor-meaning
congruity experiments manipulating the visual hemifield of stimuli investigate the extent to which spatio-motor representations that partly constitute abstract word meanings are lateralized in the
right hemisphere, consistent with the proposal that these
representations are imagistic simulations of prior perceptuo-motor experience, or lateralized in the left hemisphere, as expected if these representations arise at least in part due to experience using language.
Motor experience and concept formation: The Body-Specificity Hypothesis
Body-Specificity: If concepts are constituted, in part, by
mental simulations of our own perceptuo-motor experiences, then people
with different bodies, who interact with the environment in
systematically different ways, should develop systematically different
concepts. Motor-meaning congruity experiments testing this hypothesis
compared right- and left-handed participants and showed that manual
action concepts (e.g., grasping, poking, tickling) comprise
hand-specific spatio-motor representations. Further experiments show
that even highly abstract concepts with positive and negative valence
differ between righties and lefties - people with different bodies think differently! |