Strong versus weak embodiment: Spatial iconicity in physical, abstract, and social semantic categories.

Abstract

Perceptual and action systems seem to be related to complex cognitive processes, but the scope of grounded or embodied cognition has been questioned. Zwaan and Yaxley (2003) proposed that cognitive processes of making semantic relatedness judgments can be facilitated when word pairs are presented in ways that their referents maintain their iconic configuration rather than their reverse-iconic configuration (the spatial iconicity effect). This effect has been observed in different semantic categories using specific experiments, but it is known that embodiment is highly dependent on task demands. The present study analyzed the spatial iconicity effect in three semantic categories (physical, abstract, and social) using the same experimental criteria to determine the scope of embodied cognition. In this reaction-time experiment, 75 participants judged the semantic relatedness of 384 word pairs whose experimental items were presented in their iconic or reverse-iconic configurations. Two mixed-effects models with crossed random effects revealed that the interaction between word meaning and spatial position was present only for physical concepts but neither for abstract nor social concepts. Within the framework of strong and weak embodiment theories, the data support weak embodiment theory as the most explicative one.