Abstract
Embodied cognition posits that abstract conceptual knowledge such as mental representations of time and space are at least partially grounded in sensorimotor experiences. If true, then the execution of whole-body movements should result in modulations of temporal and spatial reference frames. To scrutinize this hypothesis, in two experiments participants either walked forward, backward or stood on a treadmill and responded either to an ambiguous temporal question (Experiment 1) or an ambiguous spatial question (Experiment 2) at the end of the walking manipulation. Results confirmed the ambiguousness of the questions in the control condition. Nevertheless, despite large power, walking forward or backward did not influence the answers or response times to the temporal (Experiment 1) or spatial (Experiment 2) question. A follow-up Experiment 3 indicated that this is also true for walking actively (or passively) in free space (as opposed to a treadmill). We explore possible reasons for the null-finding as concerns the modulation of temporal and spatial reference frames by movements and we critically discuss the methodological and theoretical implications.
Highlights
What seemed clear to the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty already in 1945 [1], is surprisingly often neglected in psychological research about temporal and spatial representations in humans: Our knowledge of the mechanisms underlying temporal and spatial representations is incomplete without understanding their relation with movement
We examined whether whole-body movements influence responses to the Wednesday-meeting question
The corresponding independent multinomial Bayes Factor is equal 24.68, indicating that the data provide 24.68 times more evidence for the null hypothesis of independence than for the alternative hypothesis of dependence, speaking in favor of the null hypothesis that movement does not influence the answer to the ambiguous temporal question
Summary
What seemed clear to the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty already in 1945 [1], is surprisingly often neglected in psychological research about temporal and spatial representations in humans: Our knowledge of the mechanisms underlying temporal and spatial representations is incomplete without understanding their relation with movement. The majority of studies in different research areas such as neurosciences, linguistics, and cognition (for overviews from different perspectives see e.g., [2,3]) focus on the relatedness between time and space, but often do not consider the influential role of movement. To this end, the current study aims at examining the impact of movements on the construction of temporal and spatial
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