Abstract
We investigated whether and how comprehending sentences that describe a social context influences our motor behaviour. Our stimuli were sentences that referred to objects having different connotations (e.g., attractive/ugly vs. smooth/prickly) and that could be directed towards the self or towards “another person” target (e.g., “The object is ugly/smooth. Bring it to you/Give it to another person”). Participants judged whether each sentence was sensible or non-sensible by moving the mouse towards or away from their body. Mouse movements were analysed according to behavioral and kinematics parameters. In order to enhance the social meaning of the linguistic stimuli, participants performed the task either individually (Individual condition) or in a social setting, in co-presence with the experimenter. The experimenter could either act as a mere observer (Social condition) or as a confederate, interacting with participants in an off-line modality at the end of task execution (Joint condition). Results indicated that the different roles taken by the experimenter affected motor behaviour and are discussed within an embodied approach to language processing and joint actions.
Highlights
The ability to coordinate our actions with others is crucial for our species
A great impulse to this kind of research has been given by the discovery of the mirror neuron system [5], and by the development of common coding theories [6,7], which are both supported by a variety of data showing that humans rely on their own motor system while observing and predicting actions performed by others
The aim of this study was to investigate how a social experimental context would enhance the link between the sentence stimuli and the motor system, allowing participants to form a more detailed simulation of the linguistically described “another person” target
Summary
The ability to coordinate our actions with others is crucial for our species. Given our social nature, it is striking that cognitive scientists have focused so far more on individual cognition, rather than on collaborative activities. Recent studies have started to investigate joint action and language, considering dialogue as an interesting example of an integrated form of joint action [8,9]. It has to be pointed out, though, that even if these studies on verbal exchange have paved the way for current joint action research, they did not tackle the issue of “how lower-level processes like action simulation and higherlevel processes like verbal communication and mental state attribution work in concert, and under which circumstances they can overrule each other” It has to be pointed out, though, that even if these studies on verbal exchange have paved the way for current joint action research, they did not tackle the issue of “how lower-level processes like action simulation and higherlevel processes like verbal communication and mental state attribution work in concert, and under which circumstances they can overrule each other” ([1], p. 365)
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