Abstract
Theories of embodied cognition suggest that conceptual processing relies on the same neural resources that are utilized for perception and action. Evidence for these perceptual simulations comes from neuroimaging and behavioural research, such as demonstrations of somatotopic motor cortex activations following the presentation of action-related words, or facilitation of grasp responses following presentation of object names. However, the interpretation of such effects has been called into question by suggestions that neural activation in modality-specific sensorimotor regions may be epiphenomenal, and merely the result of spreading activations from “disembodied”, abstracted, symbolic representations. Here, we present two studies that focus on the perceptual modalities of touch and proprioception. We show that in a timed object-comparison task, concurrent tactile or proprioceptive stimulation to the hands facilitates conceptual processing relative to control stimulation. This facilitation occurs only for small, manipulable objects, where tactile and proprioceptive information form part of the multimodal perceptual experience of interacting with such objects, but facilitation is not observed for large, nonmanipulable objects where such perceptual information is uninformative. Importantly, these facilitation effects are independent of motor and action planning, and indicate that modality-specific perceptual information plays a functionally constitutive role in our mental representations of objects, which supports embodied assumptions that concepts are grounded in the same neural systems that govern perception and action.
Highlights
How do we conceive of the world around us? How do we understand linguistic statements about the world? How do we represent objects that are not right in front of our eyes? The question of what constitutes the content of mental representations has long-exercised psychologists and philosophers alike
Following the sentence ‘‘John put the pencil in the drawer’’ people are faster to recognize the image of a pencil that is subsequently presented in a horizontal orientation onscreen, compared to a pencil that is presented with a vertical orientation
Objects that were too large to be physically manipulable, like cars and windmills, were unaffected by either tactile or proprioceptive stimulation. These findings support the idea that size representations of manipulable objects include modality-specific information about touch and position that relate to the hands, whereas size representations of nonmanipulable objects lack such information
Summary
How do we conceive of the world around us? How do we understand linguistic statements about the world? How do we represent objects that are not right in front of our eyes? The question of what constitutes the content of mental representations has long-exercised psychologists and philosophers alike. Successfully understanding these words entails partially re-enacting, or perceptually simulating, our prior bodily experiences of cinnamon and yellow. A growing body of behavioral and neurophysiological evidence supports the notion that conceptual processing engages modalityspecific systems (e.g., visual, auditory, motor) and that people automatically simulate perceptual information even when it is superfluous to task requirements [1,2]. It has been demonstrated that, when people read sentences, they automatically represent perceptual information of mentioned objects such as their shape, color, orientation and motion [8,9,10,11,12]. From an embodied cognition viewpoint, the reader has perceptually simulated the event in the sentence and so their mental pencil is automatically oriented in a situation-appropriate fashion, thereby facilitating recognition of the object with a matching orientation
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