Embodiment Hypothesis Research Articles

Vision Verbs Emerge First in English Acquisition but Touch, not Audition, Follows Second

AbstractWords that describe sensory perception give insight into how language mediates human experience, and the acquisition of these words is one way to examine how we learn to categorize and communicate sensation. We examine the differential predictions of the typological prevalence hypothesis and embodiment hypothesis regarding the acquisition of perception verbs. Studies 1 and 2 examine the acquisition trajectories of perception verbs across 12 languages using parent questionnaire responses, while Study 3 examines their relative frequencies in English corpus data. We find the vision verbs see and look are acquired first, consistent with the typological prevalence hypothesis. However, for children at 12–23 months, touch—not audition—verbs take precedence in terms of their age of acquisition, frequency in child‐produced speech, and frequency in child‐directed speech, consistent with the embodiment hypothesis. Later at 24–35 months old, frequency rates are observably different and audition begins to align with what has previously been reported in adult English data. It seems the initial orientation to verbalizing touch over audition in child–caregiver interaction is especially related to the control of physically and socially appropriate behaviors. Taken together, the results indicate children's acquisition of perception verbs arises from the complex interplay of embodiment, language‐specific input, and child‐directed socialization routines.

Cultural Courtesies: Decoding Politeness Formulas in the Aseer Dialect of Arabic

This study analyzes politeness formulas within the Aseer dialect of Arabic, employing Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the Embodiment Hypothesis as theoretical frameworks. With a dataset encompassing a total of 300 formulas, comprising 210 related to body parts and 90 linked to devotion formulas, the research unravel the conceptual metaphors and metonymies inherent in these expressions. The study elucidates the cultural alignment of these formulas and their consistency with societal norms, contributing to the preservation of oral heritage in the Aseer region. The findings highlight how human beings utilize metaphor metonymy to embody abstract ideas, emphasizing the cultural significance of these politeness formulas and their connection to the physical and cultural experiences of the Aseer community. The outcomes of the study do not only enhance our understanding of politeness formulas but also pave the way for cross-dialect and cross-linguistic comparisons and applications in various fields, such as cross-cultural pragmatics, ethnographic studies, semantic mapping, and cultural preservation.

From usage patterns to meaning construction

AbstractThe present study investigates the meaning construction emerging from figurative constructions involvingearandeyein Modern Greek. The study concerns authentic language data retrieved from a corpus search. Analysis takes into consideration the embodiment hypothesis, the development of chained metonymies and the interaction of metaphor and metonymy as the motivation for the usage patterns under investigation. The constructions analyzed reveal that the sense of vision is prioritized over hearing. Furthermore, constructional parameters of meaning show howearsandeyesare perceived in MG language and culture.Eyeis attributed the agent role in the constructions, whileearis the entity acted upon. Moreover, eyesare mainly perceived as reflections of different dimensions of the selfhood, whileearsare perceived as containers. A broader polysemy thus emerges for theeyethan for theear.

On the matter of essence

A large literature suggests that people attribute the inborn properties of living things to their essence. Here, I explore the possibility that the essence of living things must be further embodied, and that this presumption guides intuitive reasoning about all of an organism's inherited properties, physical and psychological. Accordingly, when people reason about agentive living things (animals and humans), they presume that (a) Their essence must exhibit the properties of bodily matter— it must occupy a certain location in space, and it must be comprised of some appropriate organic substance that is anchored in the body; (b) Inborn (essentialized) traits must be embodied, and conversely, embodied traits are likely innate; and (c) The identity of biological kinds and by extension, one's psychological core, are defined by the material properties of their essence. I show that the embodiment hypothesis can capture numerous phenomena, ranging from laypeople's intuitions about which psychological traits are plausibly innate to their perception of the self and its capacity to migrate to humanoids and reemerge after death.

Conceptualizations of the Heart in Jordanian Arabic: A Cognitive Perspective

The present paper examines the metaphorical and metonymical conceptualizations of the heart in Jordanian Arabic (JA) within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). The main aim is to explore how the human heart is conceptualized in JA, and to test the applicability of the different general cognitive mechanisms proposed by Niemeier (2003 and 2008) to those found in JA. The data were extracted from Idioms and Idiomatic Expressions in Levantine Arabic: Jordanian Dialect (Alzoubi, 2020), and other resources including articles, dissertations and books of Arabic proverbs. The findings revealed that all the four general cognitive mechanisms suggested by Niemeier (2003 and 2008) are applicable to JA. The findings also showed that the similarity derives from the universal aspects of the human body, which lends tremendous support to the embodiment hypothesis proposed by cognitive linguists.

Health metaphors and embodiment in Arab economic discourse

Abstract This article is a corpus-based study that examines selected economic metaphors in Arabic with a view to ascertaining whether their presence in a non-Indo-European language can be explained in terms of universal embodied cognition. When exploring the relationship between certain bodily experiences and the corresponding metaphorical expressions in Arabic this paper addresses the following research questions: (1) What is the role of embodiment in Arab economic discourse? (2) Is Arab economic discourse in any way similar to its English counterpart? (3) If so, could any of these similarities be due to the influence of English? (4) If so, does that pose a challenge to the embodiment hypothesis?

Happiness and metaphors: a perspective from Hindi phraseology

Abstract Following the tradition of embodiment hypothesis suggested by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), the current research article aims to explore metaphorical concepts of happiness in Hindi phraseological expressions. The embodiment hypothesis postulates that phraseological expressions, especially idioms, are not the frozen building blocks of a language, but motivated linguistic bundles, which encode and reflect the physical and socio-cultural experience of a given linguistic community (see Gibbs 1993). In this regard, this article not only proposes the metaphorical instances of motivated Hindi phraseological expressions but also highlights the underlying socio-cultural particularities. This article is expected to contribute to international phraseological research given that Hindi language, particularly Hindi phraseology, has hardly been taken into consideration to validate or refute the postulates of embodiment hypothesis in connection with the conceptualization of emotional concepts.

Is Cetacean Intelligence Special? New Perspectives on the Debate

In recent years, the interpretation of our observations of animal behaviour, in particular that of cetaceans, has captured a substantial amount of attention in the scientific community. The traditional view that supports a special intellectual status for this mammalian order has fallen under significant scrutiny, in large part due to problems of how to define and test the cognitive performance of animals. This paper presents evidence supporting complex cognition in cetaceans obtained using the recently developed intelligence and embodiment hypothesis. This hypothesis is based on evolutionary neuroscience and postulates the existence of a common information-processing principle associated with nervous systems that evolved naturally and serves as the foundation from which intelligence can emerge. This theoretical framework explaining animal intelligence in neural computational terms is supported using a new mathematical model. Two pathways leading to higher levels of intelligence in animals are identified, each reflecting a trade-off either in energetic requirements or the number of neurons used. A description of the evolutionary pathway that led to increased cognitive capacities in cetacean brains is detailed and evidence supporting complex cognition in cetaceans is presented. This paper also provides an interpretation of the adaptive function of cetacean neuronal traits.

Bodily Reactions to Emotional Words Referring to Own versus Other People's Emotions.

According to embodiment theories, language and emotion affect each other. In line with this, several previous studies investigated changes in bodily responses including facial expressions, heart rate or skin conductance during affective evaluation of emotional words and sentences. This study investigates the embodiment of emotional word processing from a social perspective by experimentally manipulating the emotional valence of a word and its personal reference. Stimuli consisted of pronoun-noun pairs, i.e., positive, negative, and neutral nouns paired with possessive pronouns of the first or the third person (“my,” “his”) or the non-referential negation term (“no”) as controls. Participants had to quickly evaluate the word pairs by key presses as either positive, negative, or neutral, depending on the subjective feelings they elicit. Hereafter, they elaborated the intensity of the feeling on a non-verbal scale from 1 (very unpleasant) to 9 (very pleasant). Facial expressions (M. Zygomaticus, M. Corrugator), heart rate, and, for exploratory purposes, skin conductance were recorded continuously during the spontaneous and elaborate evaluation tasks. Positive pronoun-noun phrases were responded to the quickest and judged more often as positive when they were self-related, i.e., related to the reader’s self (e.g., “my happiness,” “my joy”) than when related to the self of a virtual other (e.g., “his happiness,” “his joy”), suggesting a self-positivity bias in the emotional evaluation of word stimuli. Physiologically, evaluation of emotional, unlike neutral pronoun-noun pairs initially elicited an increase in mean heart rate irrespective of stimulus reference. Changes in facial muscle activity, M. Zygomaticus in particular, were most pronounced during spontaneous evaluation of positive other-related pronoun-noun phrases in line with theoretical assumptions that facial expressions are socially embedded even in situation where no real communication partner is present. Taken together, the present results confirm and extend the embodiment hypothesis of language by showing that bodily signals can be differently pronounced during emotional evaluation of self- and other-related emotional words.

Regional Manufacturing Disparity in India and the Role of Investment

There is some evidence that an increase in the regional manufacturing disparity in India is associated with regional (panel data specific) embodiment hypothesis. The purpose of the present article is to provide different interpretations of such association. It endeavours to illustrate that the neoclassical perspective is best suited for universal applications (and long-run tendency towards global regional convergence), and the tweaking of such principles—to generate conditional convergence theories, just to explain persistence regional disparity—fails to convince. In this present context, the present article adopts an augmented Keynesian–Youngian thesis wherein the embodiment hypothesis not only explains the intrinsic possibility of the disparity but also makes clear why the so-called conditional variables (emphasised otherwise by the neoclassical attempts) differ regionally.JEL Codes: O11, O15, O47, R11, D29

"Just out of reach: On the reliability of the action-sentence compatibility effect": Correction to Papesh (2015).

Reports an error in "Just out of reach: On the reliability of the action-sentence compatibility effect" by Megan H. Papesh (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2015[Dec], Vol 144[6], e116-e141). In the article, the Procedure did not directly state that response options were not visible on the computer screen during Experiments 7 and 8. The first sentence of the Procedure for Experiment 7 should read, “Participants completed a modified button-press version of the experiment described in Experiment 4; unlike Experiment 4, Experiment 7 included no visible on-screen elements apart from the to-be-judged sentences, which came from Glenberg and Kaschak (2002).” (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2015-53127-006.) The action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE; Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002), a hallmark finding in Embodied Cognition, implicates the motor system in language comprehension. In the ACE, people process sentences implying movement toward or away from themselves, responding with actions toward or away from their bodies. These processes interact, implying a linkage between linguistic and motor systems. From a theoretical perspective, the ACE has been extremely influential, being widely cited evidence in favor of embodied cognition. The present study began as an attempt to extend the ACE in a new direction, but eventually became a series of attempts to simply replicate the effect. Across 8 experiments, I tested whether the ACE extends to a novel mouse-tracking method and/or is susceptible to higher-order cognitive influences. In 3 experiments, attempts were made to “disembody” the ACE by presenting participants’ names on the computer screen (as in Markman & Brendl, 2005). In each experiment, the ACE could not be disembodied, because the ACE did not occur. In further experiments, the ACE was not observed in reading times, regardless of response mode (mouse movements vs. button-presses) or stimuli, including those from the original research. Similarly, no ACE was observed in physical movement times. Bayes Factor analyses of the current experiments, and the previous ACE literature, suggest that the evidence for the ACE is generally weak: Many studies considered as positive evidence actually support the null hypothesis, and very few published results offer strong evidence for the ACE. Implications for the embodiment hypothesis are discussed.

A Self-Organized Internal Models Architecture for Coding Sensory–Motor Schemes

Cognitive robotics research draws inspiration from theories and models on cognition, as conceived by neuroscience or cognitive psychology, to investigate biologically plausible computational models in artificial agents. In this field, the theoretical framework of Grounded Cognition provides epistemological and methodological grounds for the computational modeling of cognition. It has been stressed in the literature that \textit{simulation}, \textit{prediction}, and \textit{multi-modal integration} are key aspects of cognition and that computational architectures capable of putting them into play in a biologically plausible way are a necessity. Research in this direction has brought extensive empirical evidence suggesting that \textit{Internal Models} are suitable mechanisms for sensory-motor integration. However, current Internal Models architectures show several drawbacks, mainly due to the lack of a unified substrate allowing for a true sensory-motor integration space, enabling flexible and scalable ways to model cognition under the embodiment hypothesis constraints. We propose the Self-Organized Internal Models Architecture (SOIMA), a computational cognitive architecture coded by means of a network of self-organized maps, implementing coupled internal models that allow modeling multi-modal sensory-motor schemes. Our approach addresses integrally the issues of current implementations of Internal Models. We discuss the design and features of the architecture, and provide empirical results on a humanoid robot that demonstrate the benefits and potentialities of the SOIMA concept for studying cognition in artificial agents.

Just out of reach: On the reliability of the action-sentence compatibility effect.

The action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE; Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002), a hallmark finding in Embodied Cognition, implicates the motor system in language comprehension. In the ACE, people process sentences implying movement toward or away from themselves, responding with actions toward or away from their bodies. These processes interact, implying a linkage between linguistic and motor systems. From a theoretical perspective, the ACE has been extremely influential, being widely cited evidence in favor of embodied cognition. The present study began as an attempt to extend the ACE in a new direction, but eventually became a series of attempts to simply replicate the effect. Across 8 experiments, I tested whether the ACE extends to a novel mouse-tracking method and/or is susceptible to higher-order cognitive influences. In 3 experiments, attempts were made to "disembody" the ACE by presenting participants' names on the computer screen (as in Markman & Brendl, 2005). In each experiment, the ACE could not be disembodied, because the ACE did not occur. In further experiments, the ACE was not observed in reading times, regardless of response mode (mouse movements vs. button-presses) or stimuli, including those from the original research. Similarly, no ACE was observed in physical movement times. Bayes Factor analyses of the current experiments, and the previous ACE literature, suggest that the evidence for the ACE is generally weak: Many studies considered as positive evidence actually support the null hypothesis, and very few published results offer strong evidence for the ACE. Implications for the embodiment hypothesis are discussed.

Cross-modal metaphorical mapping of spoken emotion words onto vertical space.

From the field of embodied cognition, previous studies have reported evidence of metaphorical mapping of emotion concepts onto a vertical spatial axis. Most of the work on this topic has used visual words as the typical experimental stimuli. However, to our knowledge, no previous study has examined the association between affect and vertical space using a cross-modal procedure. The current research is a first step toward the study of the metaphorical mapping of emotions onto vertical space by means of an auditory to visual cross-modal paradigm. In the present study, we examined whether auditory words with an emotional valence can interact with the vertical visual space according to a ‘positive-up/negative-down’ embodied metaphor. The general method consisted in the presentation of a spoken word denoting a positive/negative emotion prior to the spatial localization of a visual target in an upper or lower position. In Experiment 1, the spoken words were passively heard by the participants and no reliable interaction between emotion concepts and bodily simulated space was found. In contrast, Experiment 2 required more active listening of the auditory stimuli. A metaphorical mapping of affect and space was evident but limited to the participants engaged in an emotion-focused task. Our results suggest that the association of affective valence and vertical space is not activated automatically during speech processing since an explicit semantic and/or emotional evaluation of the emotionally valenced stimuli was necessary to obtain an embodied effect. The results are discussed within the framework of the embodiment hypothesis.

Connecting the conceptual dots in embodied cognition: A commentary on "How body balance influences political party evaluations: a Wii balance board study".

Embodied cognition is the hypothesis that things other than the brain contribute meaningfully to the structure of our cognition. A critical (and often ignored) corollary of this is that any example of embodied cognition in action needs an account of exactly how these distributed elements are connected to one another so that they might affect each other. A given embodied cognition effect therefore needs to come with a plausible path along which information can flow (Wilson and Golonka, 2013). Identifying this path is difficult, and it's not always possible to do so immediately; this is not a problem, and simply indicates a place for future research. However, when the only viable pathway is tested and fails, there is a problem and it suggests that there is something fundamentally wrong with the analysis of the task. Dijkstra et al. (2012) asked people to attribute neutral political statements to Dutch political parties spanning the left/right political spectrum. Participants' posture was surreptitiously altered to be slightly (2%) left or right of center. The hypothesis was that leaning to the left/right would prime the conceptual metaphor “left wing/right wing.” This would then make the primed metaphor more likely to be used to interpret the otherwise neutral political statements, making people more likely to attribute the statement to a party they know to be left/right wing. This hypothesis would be supported if leaning left/right made people more likely to select a party they believed was left wing/right wing. When leaning left, people were indeed more likely to attribute the statements to left-wing political parties (p < 0.01), but when leaning right there was only a trend to attribute the statements to right wing parties (p = 0.07). The authors concluded that the results support the hypothesis. There is a problem, however. The effect was only apparent when the political party's affiliations were coded according to their actual affiliation (Dijkstra et al., Figure 2). The effect vanishes entirely when the party affiliations were coded according to participants' knowledge of that affiliation. This is because the participants were only able to correctly identify the affiliation of fewer than half of the 10 parties, and, in general, scored very low on measures of interest and knowledge of politics. The participants were missing a critical part of the puzzle (knowing which parties were left or right wing)—so how were they able to connect the conceptual dots to generate the observed effect? The authors suggest that the problem was that the 2D grid task which measured knowledge (left wing/right wing by progressive/conservative) was too hard (see also Dijkstra et al., 2014). As evidence they show a small but significant improvement in affiliation identification in a second group of participants using a 1D left/right classification (5.97/10, vs. 4.57/10 for the first group). However, the first group never completed the easier classification task and the second group never matched statements to parties. There is also the fact that the first group showed very low interest and knowledge in politics in general, suggesting they may not have benefited from the different task. At the very least, the onus is on the authors to replicate their effect with the alternative measure of knowledge, and show that the key interaction now shows up when the data are coded according to the results of that measure. We are currently left to infer that this would happen. Dijkstra et al., did the right thing in measuring the critical link (knowledge of political affiliation) but they have failed to identify that the overall pattern of results as they stand do not and cannot support their conceptual embodiment hypothesis. Their results show there is no plausible mechanism to explain the effect, no path along which information could flow. Whatever happened, it was not caused by a metaphor being grounded in postural sway.

Commentary and Rejoinder on

We respond to Williams’(2014) comments on our three failures to replicate of Study 2 from Williams and Bargh (2008). We clarify our conclusions on this topic, making clear that although the results of our studies cast doubt on the specific effect reported in Williams and Bargh (i.e., that instant hot and cold packs influence choice of reward for self or friend), a more complete understanding of the embodiment hypothesis in question requires consideration of relevant conceptual replications. Accordingly, we consider the strength of the evidence in the conceptual replications that Williams identifies and find that small samples appear to be the norm. We conclude that in order for researchers to move forward, future studies must take seriously issues of power, researcher degrees of freedom, and file drawer problems. Doing so will ensure that future studies are more informative tests of this hypothesis.

Analytic Functionalism and Mental State Attribution

We argue that analytic functionalism provides the best account of the folk psychological theory of mind, and that people ordinarily define mental states relative to the causal roles these states occupy in relation to environmental impingements, external behaviors, and other mental states. We review several key studies on mental state ascription to diverse types of entities such as robots, cyborgs, corporations, and God, and explain how this evidence supports a functional account. We also respond to two challenges to this view based on the embodiment hypothesis, or the claim that physical realizers matter over and above functional role, and qualia. In both cases we conclude that research to date best supports a functional account of ordinary mental state concepts.

Metaphors in the description of seizure experiences: Common expressions and differential diagnosis

AbstractThis paper explores the use of metaphorical expressions in the description of seizure experiences by patients with epilepsy and patients with psychogenic non-epileptic seizures. The paper addresses two main questions. First, what is the range of metaphorical expressions which patients use to describe their seizure experiences, and can these be related to conventional metaphors used by healthy individuals? Second, is the difference in the underlying cause of our patients' seizure experiences in any way reflected in their use of metaphorical expressions? The paper suggests that the answer to both of these questions is affirmative, which strengthens the embodiment hypothesis. Implications for our understanding of patients' experiences of seizures and of the difference between epileptic and non-epileptic seizures are also discussed.

Coming of age: A review of embodiment and the neuroscience of semantics

Over the last decade, there has been an increasing body of work that explores whether sensory and motor information is a necessary part of semantic representation and processing. This is the embodiment hypothesis. This paper presents a theoretical review of this work that is intended to be useful for researchers in the neurosciences and neuropsychology. Beginning with a historical perspective, relevant theories are placed on a continuum from strongly embodied to completely unembodied representations. Predictions are derived and neuroscientific and neuropsychological evidence that could support different theories is reviewed; finally, criticisms of embodiment are discussed. We conclude that strongly embodied and completely disembodied theories are not supported, and that the remaining theories agree that semantic representation involves some form of convergence zones (Damasio, 1989) and the activation of modal content. For the future, research must carefully define the boundaries of semantic processing and tackle the representation of abstract entities.

The emergence of a novel representation from action: evidence from preschoolers

Recent work in embodied cognition has proposed that representations and actions are inextricably linked. The current study examines a developmental account of this relationship. Specifically, we propose that children's actions are foundational for novel representations. Thirty-two preschoolers, aged 3.4 to 5.7 years, were asked to solve a set of simple gear-system problems. Participants' motions and verbalizations were coded to establish the strategies they used. The preschoolers initially solved the problems by simulating the turning and pushing of the gears. Subsequently, most participants discovered a new representation of the problems: the turning direction of the gears alternates. Results show that the number of actions that embodied alternation information, during their simulation of the system, predicted the later emergence of the higher-order representation (i.e. that the gears alternate turning direction). Thus, it appears that the preschoolers discovered a new representation based on their own actions. These results are consistent with the developmental embodiment hypothesis: actions are central to the emergence of new representations.