Abstract, emotional and concrete concepts and the activation of mouth-hand effectors.
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Psychiatry and Psychology
- Keywords
- type of concepts, embodied and grounded cognition, language processing, abstract concepts
- Copyright
- © 2018 Mazzuca 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
- 2018. Abstract, emotional and concrete concepts and the activation of mouth-hand effectors. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26559v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26559v2
Abstract
According to embodied and grounded theories concepts are grounded in sensorimotor systems. The majority of evidence supporting these views concerns concepts referring to objects or actions, while evidence on abstract concepts is more scarce. Explaining how abstract concepts, as “freedom”, are represented, would however be pivotal for grounded theories. According to some recent proposals, abstract concepts are grounded evoking both sensorimotor and linguistic experience, thus activating the mouth motor system more than concrete concepts. Two experiments are reported, aimed at verifying whether abstract, concrete and emotional words activate the mouth and hand effectors. In both experiments participants performed first a lexical decision, then a recognition task. In Experiment 1 participants responded by pressing a button either with the mouth or with the hand, in Experiment 2 responses were given with the foot, while a button held either in the mouth or in the hand was used to respond to catch-trials. Abstract words were slower to process in both tasks (concreteness effect). Across the tasks and experiments, emotional concepts had instead a fluctuating pattern, different from those of both concrete and abstract concepts, suggesting that they cannot be considered as a subset of abstract concepts. The interaction between kind of concept (abstract, concrete and emotional) and effector (mouth, hand) was not significant in the lexical decision task, likely because it emerged only with tasks implying a deeper processing level. It reached significance, instead, in the accuracy analyses of the recognition tasks. In both experiments abstract concepts yielded less errors in the mouth than in the hand condition, supporting our main prediction. Emotional concepts had instead a more variable pattern. Overall, our findings indicate that different kinds of concepts differently activate the mouth and hand effectors, but they also suggests that concepts activate effectors in a flexible and task-dependent way.
Author Comment
This new version of preprint includes the section of acknowledgments.
