Embodiment as preparation: Pupillary responses to words that convey a sense of brightness or darkness
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Neuroscience, Psychiatry and Psychology
- Keywords
- embodied cognition, pupillary light response, pupillometry, language comprehension
- Copyright
- © 2016 Mathôt et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Embodiment as preparation: Pupillary responses to words that convey a sense of brightness or darkness. PeerJ Preprints 4:e1795v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1795v1
Abstract
A strongly embodied view of language holds that, to understand a word, you must simulate associated sensory input (e.g. simulate perception of brightness to understand 'lamp'), and prepare associated actions (e.g. prepare finger movements to understand 'typing'). To test this, we measured pupillary responses to single words that conveyed a sense of brightness (e.g. 'day') or darkness (e.g. 'night'), or were luminance-neutral (e.g. 'house'). Crucially, we found that the pupil was largest for darkness-conveying words, intermediate for neutral words, and smallest for brightness-conveying words; however, this semantic pupillary response peaked long after participants had already understood and responded to the words. These findings suggest that word comprehension activates sensory representations, and even triggers physiological (pupillary) responses, but that this occurs too late to be a necessary part of the comprehension process itself. Instead, we suggest that pupillary responses to darkness- and brightness-conveying words--and perhaps embodied language in general--may reflect preparation for the immediate future: When you read the word 'lamp', you automatically prepare to look at a lamp, and prepare to read more brightness-related words; this may cause your pupils to constrict in anticipation.
Author Comment
This is a manuscript in preparation that is made available for community feedback, and will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.