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Searching for cultural influences on the body-specific association of preferred hand and emotional valence
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Can an avatar’s body movements change a person’s perception of good and bad? We discuss virtual embodiment according to theories of embodied cognition (EC), and afferent and sensorimotor correspondences. We present an example study using... more
Can an avatar’s body movements change a person’s perception of good and bad? We discuss virtual embodiment according to theories of embodied cognition (EC), and afferent and sensorimotor correspondences. We present an example study using virtual reality (VR) to test EC theory, testing the effect of altered virtual embodiment on perception. Participants either controlled an avatar whose arm movements were similar to their own or reflected the mirror opposite of their arm movements. We measured their associations of “good” and “bad” with the left and right (i.e., space-valence associations). This study demonstrated how VR could be used to examine the possible ways that systems of the body (e.g., visual, motor) may interact to influence cognition. The implications of this research suggest that visual feedback alone is not enough to alter space-valence associations. Multiple sensory experiences of media (i.e., sensorimotor feedback) may be necessary to influence cognition, not simply vi...
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People use space to think about a variety of non-spatial concepts like time, number, and emotional valence. These spatial metaphors can be used to inform the design of user interfaces, digital and otherwise, in which many of these same... more
People use space to think about a variety of non-spatial concepts like time, number, and emotional valence. These spatial metaphors can be used to inform the design of user interfaces, digital and otherwise, in which many of these same concepts are visualized in space. Traditionally, researchers have relied on patterns in language to discover habits of metaphorical thinking. Here we argue that researchers and designers must look beyond language for evidence of spatial metaphors, many of which remain unspoken despite their pervasive effects on people’s preferences, memories, and actions. We propose a simple principle for predicting spatial metaphors from the structure of people’s experiences, whether those experiences are linguistic, cultural, or bodily. By leveraging the latent metaphorical structure of people’s minds, we can design interfaces that help people think.
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To explain how people think and communicate, cognitive scientists posit a repository of concepts, categories, and word meanings that are stable across time and shared across individuals. But if concepts are stable, how can people use them... more
To explain how people think and communicate, cognitive scientists posit a repository of concepts, categories, and word meanings that are stable across time and shared across individuals. But if concepts are stable, how can people use them so flexibly? Here we explore a possible answer: maybe this stability is an illusion. Perhaps all con-cepts, categories, and word meanings (CC&Ms) are constructed ad hoc, each time we use them. On this proposal, which we call the ad hoc cognition (AHC) framework, all words are infinitely polysemous, all communication is “good enough, ” and no idea is ever the same twice. The details of people’s ad hoc CC&Ms are determined by the way retrieval cues (such as words) interact with the physical, social, and linguistic context. Commonalities across instantiations of CC&Ms yield some emergent stabil-ity and create the illusion of context-independent core properties. Here we argue that even the most stable-seeming CC&Ms are instantiated via the same process...
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Research Interests:
Do the languages that people speak affect the way they think about musical pitch? Here we compared pitch representations in native speakers of Dutch and Farsi. Dutch speakers describe pitches as "high" (hoog) and "low"... more
Do the languages that people speak affect the way they think about musical pitch? Here we compared pitch representations in native speakers of Dutch and Farsi. Dutch speakers describe pitches as "high" (hoog) and "low" (laag), but Farsi speakers describe high-frequency pitches as "thin" (naazok) and low-frequency pitches as "thick" (koloft). Differences in language were reflected in differences in performance on two psychophysical pitch reproduction tasks. This was true even though the tasks used entirely nonlinguistic stimuli and responses. To test whether experience using language changes pitch representations, we trained native Dutch speakers to use Farsi-like metaphors, describing pitch relationships in terms of thickness. After training, Dutch speakers" performance on a nonlinguistic psychophysical task resembled native Farsi speakers". People who use different space-pitch metaphors in language also think about pitch differently...
Does gesturing help speakers find the right words? According to several theories of speech-gesture relationships, iconic gestures should facilitate speech production, but beat gestures should not. Here we tested the effects of gesturing... more
Does gesturing help speakers find the right words? According to several theories of speech-gesture relationships, iconic gestures should facilitate speech production, but beat gestures should not. Here we tested the effects of gesturing on word production in two experiments. Participants produced low-frequency words from their definitions while instructed to perform beat gestures, iconic gestures, or while not given any instructions about gesturing (baseline condition). Compared to baseline, participants were faster to produce the target words while performing beat gestures, bimanually or with their left hand alone, but they were slower to produce the target words when instructed to perform iconic gestures. Results provide the first evidence that beat gestures can help speakers produce words. This benefit may arise from the fact that gestures are motor actions, rather than from any special properties of gestures, per se.
Why do people accommodate to each other's linguistic behavior? Studies of natural interactions (Giles, Taylor & Bourhis, 1973) suggest that speakers accommodate to achieve interactional goals, influencing what their interlocutor... more
Why do people accommodate to each other's linguistic behavior? Studies of natural interactions (Giles, Taylor & Bourhis, 1973) suggest that speakers accommodate to achieve interactional goals, influencing what their interlocutor thinks or feels about them. But is this the only reason speakers accommodate? In real-world conversations, interactional motivations are ubiquitous, making it difficult to assess the extent to which they drive accommodation. Do speakers still accommodate even when interactional goals cannot be achieved, for instance, when their interlocutor cannot interpret their accommodation behavior? To find out, we asked participants to enter an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment and to converse with a virtual interlocutor. Participants accommodated to the speech rate of their virtual interlocutor even though he could not interpret their linguistic behavior, and thus accommodation could not possibly help them to achieve interactional goals. Results show that ...
Since Saussure, the idea that the forms of words are arbitrarily related to their meanings has been widely accepted. Yet, implicit metaphorical mappings may provide opportunities for iconicity throughout the lexicon. We hypothesized that... more
Since Saussure, the idea that the forms of words are arbitrarily related to their meanings has been widely accepted. Yet, implicit metaphorical mappings may provide opportunities for iconicity throughout the lexicon. We hypothesized that vertical spatial metaphors for emotional valence are manifested in language through space in signed languages and through the spatialized dimension of pitch in spoken languages. In Experiment 1, we analyzed the directions of the hand motions constituting words in three signed languages, and related them to the valence of their English translation equivalents. The vertical direction of signs predicted their valences. On average, signs with upward movements were the most positive in valence, and signs with downward movements the most negative. Signs with non-vertical movements were intermediate in valence. Experiment 2 extended this type of analysis to a tonal language, Mandarin Chinese. The pitch contours of Chinese words predicted the valence of the...
2 Do people think about time the way they talk about it? This chapter examines dissociations between temporal language and temporal thinking in speakers of English and of Darija, a dialect of Moroccan Arabic. In both languages,... more
2 Do people think about time the way they talk about it? This chapter examines dissociations between temporal language and temporal thinking in speakers of English and of Darija, a dialect of Moroccan Arabic. In both languages, conventional metaphors suggest that the future is ahead of the speaker and the past is behind. Yet, English speakers typically conceptualize the future as rightward and the past as leftward – a spatial mapping that is not conventionalized in any known spoken language. Darija speakers typically conceptualize the past as ahead and the future a behind them – a spatial mapping that directly contradicts their verbal metaphors. Darija speakers’ “backward ” mapping of time does not appear to arise from any feature of their language, or from their physical experience with the natural world, but rather from their cultural bias to focus on the past (i.e., to value their ancestry and practice ancient traditions). Analyses of verbal space-time metaphors reveal that human...
Linguistically modulated perception and cognition: the label-feedback hypothesis
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Right-handers tend to associate “good” with the right side of space and “bad” with the left. This implicit association appears to arise from the way people perform actions, more or less fluently, with their right and left hands. Here we... more
Right-handers tend to associate “good” with the right side of space and “bad” with the left. This implicit association appears to arise from the way people perform actions, more or less fluently, with their right and left hands. Here we tested whether observing manual actions performed with greater or lesser fluency can affect observers’ space-valence associations. In two experiments, we assigned one participant (the actor) to perform a bimanual fine motor task while another participant (the observer) watched. Actors were assigned to wear a ski glove on either the right or left hand, which made performing the actions on this side of space disfluent. In Experiment 1, observers stood behind the actors, sharing their spatial perspective. After motor training, both actors and observers tended to associate “good” with the side of the actors’ free hand and “bad” with the side of the gloved hand. To determine whether observers’ space-valence associations were computed from their own perspe...
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Communication, Psycholinguistics, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and 15 moreLanguage, Prefrontal Cortex, Intention, Perspective Taking, Brain Mapping, Communicative action, Humans, Psychological, Female, Male, Aptitude, Human Brain, Adult, Psychological Science, and Frontal Lobe
In Arabic, as in many languages, the future is "ahead" and the past is "behind." Yet in the research reported here, we showed that Arabic speakers tend to conceptualize the future as behind and the past as ahead of... more
In Arabic, as in many languages, the future is "ahead" and the past is "behind." Yet in the research reported here, we showed that Arabic speakers tend to conceptualize the future as behind and the past as ahead of them, despite using spoken metaphors that suggest the opposite. We propose a new account of how space-time mappings become activated in individuals' minds and entrenched in their cultures, the temporal-focus hypothesis: People should conceptualize either the future or the past as in front of them to the extent that their culture (or subculture) is future oriented or past oriented. Results support the temporal-focus hypothesis, demonstrating that the space-time mappings in people's minds are conditioned by their cultural attitudes toward time, that they depend on attentional focus, and that they can vary independently of the space-time mappings enshrined in language.
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Right-handers tend to associate "good" with the right side of space and "bad" with the left. This implicit association appears to arise from the way people perform actions, more or less fluently, with their right and... more
Right-handers tend to associate "good" with the right side of space and "bad" with the left. This implicit association appears to arise from the way people perform actions, more or less fluently, with their right and left hands. Here we tested whether observing manual actions performed with greater or lesser fluency can affect observers' space-valence associations. In two experiments, we assigned one participant (the actor) to perform a bimanual fine motor task while another participant (the observer) watched. Actors were assigned to wear a ski glove on either the right or left hand, which made performing the actions on this side of space disfluent. In Experiment 1, observers stood behind the actors, sharing their spatial perspective. After motor training, both actors and observers tended to associate "good" with the side of the actors' free hand and "bad" with the side of the gloved hand. To determine whether observers' space-vale...
Across cultures, people conceptualize time as if it flows along a horizontal timeline, but the direction of this implicit timeline is culture-specific: in cultures with left-to-right orthography (e.g., English-speaking cultures) time... more
Across cultures, people conceptualize time as if it flows along a horizontal timeline, but the direction of this implicit timeline is culture-specific: in cultures with left-to-right orthography (e.g., English-speaking cultures) time appears to flow rightward, but in cultures with right-to-left orthography (e.g., Arabic-speaking cultures) time flows leftward. Can orthography influence implicit time representations independent of other cultural and linguistic factors? Native Dutch speakers performed a space-time congruity task with the instructions and stimuli written in either standard Dutch or mirror-reversed Dutch. Participants in the Standard Dutch condition were fastest to judge past-oriented phrases by pressing the left button and future-oriented phrases by pressing the right button. Participants in the Mirror-Reversed Dutch condition showed the opposite pattern of reaction times, consistent with results found previously in native Arabic and Hebrew speakers. These results demon...
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Abstract: Do English speakers think about time the way they talk about it? In spoken English, time appears to!ow along the sagittal axis (front/back): the future is ahead and the past is behind us. Here we show that when asked to ges-ture... more
Abstract: Do English speakers think about time the way they talk about it? In spoken English, time appears to!ow along the sagittal axis (front/back): the future is ahead and the past is behind us. Here we show that when asked to ges-ture about past and future events deliberately, English speakers o"en use the sagittal axis, as language suggests they should. By contrast, when producing co-speech gestures spontaneously, they use the lateral axis (le"/right) overwhelm-ingly more o"en, gesturing le"ward for earlier times and rightward for later times. This le"-right mapping of time is consistent with the!ow of time on calendars and graphs in English-speaking cultures, but is completely absent from conven-tional spoken metaphors. English speakers gesture on the lateral axis even when they are using front/ back metaphors in their co-occurring speech. This speech-gesture dissociation is not due to any lack of lexical or constructional resources to spatialize time...
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How does culture shape our concepts? Across many cultures, people conceptualize time as if it flows along a horizontal timeline, but the direction of this implicit timeline is culture specific: Later times are on the right in some... more
How does culture shape our concepts? Across many cultures, people conceptualize time as if it flows along a horizontal timeline, but the direction of this implicit timeline is culture specific: Later times are on the right in some cultures but on the left in others. Here we investigated whether experience reading can determine the direction and orientation of the mental timeline, independent of other cultural and linguistic factors. Dutch speakers performed space–time congruity tasks with the instructions and stimuli written in either standard, mirror-reversed, or rotated orthography. When participants judged temporal phrases written in standard orthography, their reaction times were consistent with a rightward-directed mental timeline, but after brief exposure to mirror-reversed orthography, their mental timelines were reversed. When standard orthography was rotated 90 ° clockwise (downward) or counterclockwise (upward), participants ’ mental timelines were rotated, accordingly. Re...
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In two experiments, Brookshire, Ivry, and Casasanto (2010) showed that words with positive and negative emotional valence can activate spatial representations with a high degree of automa-ticity, but also that this activation is highly... more
In two experiments, Brookshire, Ivry, and Casasanto (2010) showed that words with positive and negative emotional valence can activate spatial representations with a high degree of automa-ticity, but also that this activation is highly context dependent. Lebois, Wilson-Mendenhall, and Barsalou (2015) reported that they “aimed to replicate ” our study but found only null results in the “Brookshire et al. replication ” conditions. Here we express concerns about three aspects of this paper. First, the study was not an attempt to replicate ours; it was a different study that adapted our method. Second, Lebois et al. did not accurately represent our theoretical position. Third, Lebois et al.’s main conclusion, that spatial congruity effects depend on the task context, was not supported by their data. Despite these concerns, we agree with Lebois et al.’s overall message that spatial aspects of words ’ meanings are activated differently in different contexts. This was a main conclusion of ...
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Hemispheric specialization during episodic memory encoding was examined using three functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tasks. Stimuli for the three tasks differed in the degree to which they elicited subjects' use of verbal... more
Hemispheric specialization during episodic memory encoding was examined using three functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tasks. Stimuli for the three tasks differed in the degree to which they elicited subjects' use of verbal and image-based encoding strategies. Intentional encoding of visually presented scenes, sentences, and faces was associated with neural activity in the hippocampus and surrounding mesial Temporal Lobe (mTL) structures. Across tasks, material-specific lateralization of neural activity was observed in the posterior mTL. In contrast, hippocampal activation did not lateralize according to material type for two of the three tasks. These results suggest a functional dissociation between the hippocampus and other mTL subcomponents, and indicate that material-specificity may not fully explain hemispheric specialization in the mTL memory system.
Spatial congruity effects reveal metaphors, not markedness Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9556q7sv Journal Abstract Spatial congruity effects have often been interpreted as evidence for metaphorical thinking, but an... more
Spatial congruity effects reveal metaphors, not markedness Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9556q7sv Journal Abstract Spatial congruity effects have often been interpreted as evidence for metaphorical thinking, but an alternative markedness-based account challenges this view. In two experiments, we directly compared metaphor and markedness explanations for spatial congruity effects, using musical pitch as a testbed. English speakers who talk about pitch in terms of spatial height were tested in speeded space-pitch compatibility tasks. To determine whether space-pitch congruency effects could be elicited by any marked spatial continuum, participants were asked to classify high-and low-frequency pitches as 'high' and 'low' or as 'front' and 'back' (both pairs of terms constitute cases of marked continuums). We found congruency effects in high/low conditions but not in front/back conditions, indicating that markedness is not sufficient to accou...
Filtering words through our fingers as we type appears to be changing their meanings. On average, words typed with more letters from the right side of the QWERTY keyboard are more positive in meaning than words typed with more letters... more
Filtering words through our fingers as we type appears to be changing their meanings. On average, words typed with more letters from the right side of the QWERTY keyboard are more positive in meaning than words typed with more letters from the left: This is the QWERTY effect In five experiments, here we replicate the QWERTY effect in a large corpus of English words, extend it to two new languages (Portuguese and German), and show that the effect is mediated by space-valence associations encoded at the level of individual letters. Finally, we show that QWERTY appears to be influencing the names American parents give their children. Together, these experiments demonstrate the generality of the QWERTY effect, and inform our theories of how people's bodily interactions with a cultural artifact can change the way they use language.
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Abstract. How are space and time represented in the human mind? Here we evaluate two theoretical proposals, one suggesting a symmetric relationship be-tween space and time (ATOM theory) and the other an asymmetric relationship (metaphor... more
Abstract. How are space and time represented in the human mind? Here we evaluate two theoretical proposals, one suggesting a symmetric relationship be-tween space and time (ATOM theory) and the other an asymmetric relationship (metaphor theory). In Experiment 1, Dutch-speakers saw 7-letter nouns that named concrete objects of various spatial lengths (tr. pencil, bench, footpath) and estimated how much time they remained on the screen. In Experiment 2, participants saw nouns naming temporal events of various durations (tr. blink, party, season) and estimated the words ’ spatial length. Nouns that named short objects were judged to remain on the screen for a shorter time, and nouns that named longer objects to remain for a longer time. By contrast, variations in the duration of the event nouns ’ referents had no effect on judgments of the words’ spatial length. This asymmetric pattern of cross-dimensional interference sup-ports metaphor theory and challenges ATOM.
Research Interests: Psychology, Psychophysics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Metaphor, and 7 moreSpace, TIME, Seasonality, Noun, Space Time, Atom, and Time
Does gesturing help speakers find the right words? According to several theories of speech-gesture relationships, iconic gestures should facilitate speech production, but beat gestures should not. Here we tested the effects of gesturing... more
Does gesturing help speakers find the right words? According to several theories of speech-gesture relationships, iconic gestures should facilitate speech production, but beat gestures should not. Here we tested the effects of gesturing on word production in two experiments. Participants produced lowfrequency words from their definitions while instructed to perform beat gestures, iconic gestures, or while not given any instructions about gesturing (baseline condition). Compared to baseline, participants were faster to produce the target words while performing beat gestures, bimanually or with their left hand alone, but they were slower to produce the target words when instructed to perform iconic gestures. Results provide the first evidence that beat gestures can help speakers produce words. This benefit may arise from the fact that gestures are motor actions, rather than from any special properties of gestures, per se.
Research Interests:
Right-handers tend to associate “good” with the right side of space and “bad” with the left. This implicit association appears to arise from the way people perform actions, more or less fluently, with their right and left hands. Here we... more
Right-handers tend to associate “good” with the right side of space and “bad” with the left. This implicit association appears to arise from the way people perform actions, more or less fluently, with their right and left hands. Here we tested whether observing manual actions performed with greater or lesser fluency can affect observers’ space-valence associations. In two experiments, we assigned one participant (the actor) to perform a bimanual fine motor task while another participant (the observer) watched. Actors were assigned to wear a ski glove on either the right or left hand, which made performing the actions on this side of space disfluent. In Experiment 1, observers stood behind the actors, sharing their spatial perspective. After motor training, both actors and observers tended to associate “good” with the side of the actors’ free hand and “bad” with the side of the gloved hand. To determine whether observers’ space-valence associations were computed from their own perspe...
Research Interests:
How are space and time related in the brain? This study contrasts two proposals that make different predictions about the interaction between spatial and temporal magnitudes. Whereas ATOM implies that space and time are symmetrically... more
How are space and time related in the brain? This study contrasts two proposals that make different predictions about the interaction between spatial and temporal magnitudes. Whereas ATOM implies that space and time are symmetrically related, Metaphor Theory claims they are asymmetrically related. Here we investigated whether space and time activate the same neural structures in the inferior parietal cortex (IPC) and whether the activation is symmetric or asymmetric across domains. We measured participants’ neural activity while they made temporal and spatial judgments on the same visual stimuli. The behavioral results replicated earlier observations of a space-time asymmetry: Temporal judgments were more strongly influenced by irrelevant spatial information than vice versa. The BOLD fMRI data indicated that space and time activated overlapping clusters in the IPC and that, consistent with Metaphor Theory, this activation was asymmetric: The shared region of IPC was activated more s...
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People conceptualize both time and numbers as unfolding along a horizontal line, either from left to right or from right to left. The direction of both the mental timeline (MTL) and the mental number line (MNL) are widely assumed to... more
People conceptualize both time and numbers as unfolding along a horizontal line, either from left to right or from right to left. The direction of both the mental timeline (MTL) and the mental number line (MNL) are widely assumed to depend on the direction of reading and writing within a culture. Although experimental evidence supports this assumption regarding the MTL, there is no clear evidence that reading direction determines the direction of the MNL. Here we tested effects of reading experience on the direction of both the MTL and MNL. Participants read English text either normally (from left to right) or mirror-reversed (from right to left). After normal reading, participants showed the spacetime associations and space-number associations typical of Westerners. After mirror reading, participants’ space-time associations were significantly reduced but their spacenumber associations were unchanged. These results suggest that the MTL and MNL have different experiential bases. Whe...
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The Thickness of Musical Pitch: Psychophysical evidence for the Whorfian hypothesis Sarah Dolscheid 1,2 Shakila Shayan 1 Asifa Majid 1,3 Daniel Casasanto 1,3,4 (sarah.dolscheid@mpi.nl) (shakila.shayan@mpi.nl) (asifa.majid@mpi.nl)... more
The Thickness of Musical Pitch: Psychophysical evidence for the Whorfian hypothesis Sarah Dolscheid 1,2 Shakila Shayan 1 Asifa Majid 1,3 Daniel Casasanto 1,3,4 (sarah.dolscheid@mpi.nl) (shakila.shayan@mpi.nl) (asifa.majid@mpi.nl) (casasand@newschool.edu) Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, NL International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, Nijmegen, NL Donders Center for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, NL Department of Psychology, The New School for Social Research, New York, USA pitches (Lidji, Kolinsky, Lochy, & Morais, 2007; Rusconi, Kwan, Giordano, Umilta, & Butterworth, 2006). Beyond binary high-low correspondences, psychophysical pitch reproduction tasks show that pitch maps onto vertical space in a continuous analog fashion (Casasanto, 2010). Pitch and vertical space have been found to interact even in prelinguistic infants. In a preferential looking task, 3- to 4-month-olds preferred congruent trials (in which ...
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People often talk about musical pitch in terms of spatial metaphors. In English, for instance, pitches can be high or low, whereas in other languages pitches are described as thick or thin. According to psychophysical studies, metaphors... more
People often talk about musical pitch in terms of spatial metaphors. In English, for instance, pitches can be high or low, whereas in other languages pitches are described as thick or thin. According to psychophysical studies, metaphors in language can also shape people’s nonlinguistic space-pitch representations. But does language establish mappings between space and pitch in the first place or does it modify preexisting associations? Here we tested 4-month-old Dutch infants’ sensitivity to height-pitch and thickness-pitch mappings in two preferential looking tasks. Dutch infants looked significantly longer at cross-modally congruent stimuli in both experiments, indicating that infants are sensitive to space-pitch associations prior to language. This early presence of space-pitch mappings suggests that these associations do not originate from language. Rather, language may build upon pre-existing mappings and change them gradually via some form of competitive associative learning.
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Discovering the Conceptual Primitives Lisa Aziz-Zadeh (lazizzad@usc.edu) University of Southern California, Department of Occupational Science Daniel Casasanto (casasan@stanford.edu) Stanford University, Department of Psychology Jerome... more
Discovering the Conceptual Primitives Lisa Aziz-Zadeh (lazizzad@usc.edu) University of Southern California, Department of Occupational Science Daniel Casasanto (casasan@stanford.edu) Stanford University, Department of Psychology Jerome Feldman (feldman@icsi.berkeley.edu) University of California at Berkeley & International Computer Science Institute Rebecca Saxe (saxe@mit.edu) MIT, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences Leonard Talmy (talmy@buffalo.edu) State University of New York at Buffalo, Department of Linguistics Keywords: conceptual primitive; development; linguistics; neuroscience; experiment; unified cognitive science Putative Conceptual Primitives Concepts that seem to be (nearly) linguistically universal are good candidates for the conceptual primitives. One immediate goal is to make an organized collection of such potential primitives and then try to design experiments to test which of these proposed primitives is always realized and therefore available as a basis fo...
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Overview In this talk, I will present two sets of experiments exploring how spontaneous gestures relate to words, thoughts, and meaningless motor actions. In the first half, I will discuss examples of two previously undocumented types of... more
Overview In this talk, I will present two sets of experiments exploring how spontaneous gestures relate to words, thoughts, and meaningless motor actions. In the first half, I will discuss examples of two previously undocumented types of metaphorical co-speech gestures, which are not easily described within existing classification schemes (Cienki, 2005; McNeill, 1992; Muller, 1998). In the second half, I will present experiments showing bidirectional influences between simple repetitive motor actions and talking or thinking about memories with metaphorical content.
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Body-specific representations of action verbs: Evidence from fMRI in right- and left-handers Daniel Casasanto 1 Roel Willems 2 Peter Hagoort 1,2 (daniel.casasanto@mpi.nl) (roel.willems@donders.ru.nl) (peter.hagoort@donders.ru.nl) Max... more
Body-specific representations of action verbs: Evidence from fMRI in right- and left-handers Daniel Casasanto 1 Roel Willems 2 Peter Hagoort 1,2 (daniel.casasanto@mpi.nl) (roel.willems@donders.ru.nl) (peter.hagoort@donders.ru.nl) Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, P.O. Box 9101, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands Abstract neurocognitive representations should differ for people who perceive and act upon the environment in systematically different ways. We investigated whether activity in motor cortex during action verb processing reflects the way an individual language user typically performs the action that the verb refers to. Across neuroimaging studies, activity in cortical motor areas associated with manual action verbs has been left- lateralized (Aziz-Zadeh et al., 2006; Hauk et al., 2004; Ruschemeyer, Brass, & Friederici, 2007; Tettamanti et al., 2005)...
Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Decision Making, Embodied Cognition, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Imagination, and 15 moreLanguage Processing, Motor planning, Brain Mapping, Humans, Female, Neuroimage, Male, Motor Cortex, Lexical Decision, Premotor cortex, Mental Simulation, Adult, Frontal Lobe, Functional Laterality, and Medical and Health Sciences
We investigated the extent to which emotionally valenced words automatically cue spatio-motor representations. Participants made speeded button presses, moving their hand upward or downward while viewing words with positive or negative... more
We investigated the extent to which emotionally valenced words automatically cue spatio-motor representations. Participants made speeded button presses, moving their hand upward or downward while viewing words with positive or negative valence. Only the color of the words was relevant to the response; on target trials, there was no requirement to read the words or process their meaning. In Experiment 1, upward responses were faster for positive words, and downward for negative words. This effect was extinguished, however, when words were repeated. In Experiment 2, participants performed the same primary task with the addition of distractor trials. Distractors either oriented attention toward the words’ meaning or toward their color. Congruity effects were increased with orientation to meaning, but eliminated with orientation to color. When people read words with emotional valence, vertical spatio-motor representations are activated highly automatically, but this automaticity is modu...
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Hemispheric Specialization During Episodic Memory Encoding in the Human Hippocampus and MTL Daniel J. Casasanto† (dcasasan@mail.med.upenn.edu) William D. S. Killgore† (killgore@mclean.harvard.edu) Guila Glosser†... more
Hemispheric Specialization During Episodic Memory Encoding in the Human Hippocampus and MTL Daniel J. Casasanto† (dcasasan@mail.med.upenn.edu) William D. S. Killgore† (killgore@mclean.harvard.edu) Guila Glosser† (glosser@mail.med.upenn.edu) Joseph A. Maldjian‡ (maldjian@oasis.rad.upenn.edu) John A. Detre†‡ (detre@mail.med.upenn.edu) Departments of Neurology and Radiology, University of Pennsylvania Medical Center 3400 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA Abstract Hemispheric specialization during episodic memory encoding was examined using three functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tasks. Stimuli for the three tasks differed in the degree to which they elicited subjects’ use of verbal and image- based encoding strategies. Intentional encoding of visually presented scenes, sentences, and faces was associated with neural activity in the hippocampus and surrounding mesial Temporal Lobe (mTL) structures. Across tasks, material- specific lateralization of neural activity was...
Research Interests:
Searching for cultural influences on the body-specific association of preferred hand and emotional valence Juanma de la Fuente (jdelafuente@ugr.es) Dept. de Psicologia Experimental y Fisiologia del Comportamiento, University of Granada,... more
Searching for cultural influences on the body-specific association of preferred hand and emotional valence Juanma de la Fuente (jdelafuente@ugr.es) Dept. de Psicologia Experimental y Fisiologia del Comportamiento, University of Granada, Granada, Spain Daniel Casasanto (casasand@newschool.edu) Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Donders Center for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, NL Department of Psychology, The New School for Social Research, New York, USA Antonio Roman (reche@ugr.es) Dept. de Psicologia Experimental y Fisiologia del Comportamiento, University of Granada, Granada, Spain Julio Santiago (santiago@ugr.es) Dept. de Psicologia Experimental y Fisiologia del Comportamiento, University of Granada, Granada, Spain Abstract the difference between right- and left-handers’ judgments. Rather, bodily differences determine the direction of space-valence associations. Interestingly, Casasanto (2009) found no evidence of...
Research Interests:
Bodily Relativity: The body-specificity of language and thought Daniel Casasanto (casasand@newschool.edu) Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, NL Donders Center for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior, Nijmegen, NL The New... more
Bodily Relativity: The body-specificity of language and thought Daniel Casasanto (casasand@newschool.edu) Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, NL Donders Center for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior, Nijmegen, NL The New School for Social Research, New York, USA Abstract Do people with different kinds of bodies think differently? According to the body-specificity hypothesis (Casasanto 2009), they should. In this paper, I review evidence that right- and left-handers, who perform actions in systematically dif- ferent ways, use correspondingly different areas of the brain for imagining actions and representing the meanings of action verbs. Beyond the concrete domain of action, the way people use their hands influences the way they represent abstract ideas with positive and negative emotional valence like “goodness,” “honesty,” and “intelligence,” and how they communicate about them in spontaneous speech and gesture. Changing how people use their right and left hands can c...
Research Interests:
Virtually accommodating: Speech rate accommodation to a virtual interlocutor. Laura Staum Casasanto 1 (laura.casasanto@mpi.nl) Kyle Jasmin 1 (kyle.jasmin@mpi.nl) Daniel Casasanto 1,2 (daniel.casasanto@mpi.nl) Max Planck Institute for... more
Virtually accommodating: Speech rate accommodation to a virtual interlocutor. Laura Staum Casasanto 1 (laura.casasanto@mpi.nl) Kyle Jasmin 1 (kyle.jasmin@mpi.nl) Daniel Casasanto 1,2 (daniel.casasanto@mpi.nl) Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Neurobiology of Language Group, Nijmegen, NL Donders Center for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior, Radboud University, Nijmegen, NL Abstract But are immediate social motivations necessary to make speakers accommodate? Or might speakers accommodate even in the absence of a desire to achieve direct interactional goals? Mechanistic theories of dialogue (Pickering & Garrod, 2004) offer one possible alternative. Automatic alignment processes could account for convergence in linguistic behavior. That is, speakers might use similar linguistic forms to those used by their interlocutors because these forms are highly active and thus have an advantage over alternatives in the selection process. On another alternative, accommodation could be a cons...
Research Interests:
The relation of space and musical pitch in the brain Sarah Dolscheid 1,2,3 (sarah_dolscheid@gmx.de) Roel M. Willems 1,4 (roel.willems@fcdonders.ru.nl) Peter Hagoort 1,4 Daniel Casasanto 5 (Peter.Hagoort@mpi.nl) (casasanto@uchicago.edu) 1... more
The relation of space and musical pitch in the brain Sarah Dolscheid 1,2,3 (sarah_dolscheid@gmx.de) Roel M. Willems 1,4 (roel.willems@fcdonders.ru.nl) Peter Hagoort 1,4 Daniel Casasanto 5 (Peter.Hagoort@mpi.nl) (casasanto@uchicago.edu) 1 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, NL Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, Nijmegen, NL 3 Department of Rehabilitation and Special Education, University of Cologne, GER 4 Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, NL 5 Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, USA 2 International Dolscheid, Hunnius, Casasanto, & Majid, 2012; Jeschonek, Pauen, & Babocsai, 2012). Although numerous behavioral experiments confirm links between spatial height and musical pitch, they do not shed light on the neuronal underpinnings of space-pitch associations. According to theories of embodied cognition, neural systems for perception and action also subserve thinking. When people perceive stim...
Research Interests:
Spatial congruity effects reveal metaphors, not markedness Sarah Dolscheid 1,2 (sarah.dolscheid@mpi.nl) Cleve Graver 4 (gravc243@newschool.edu) Daniel Casasanto 3,4 (casasand@newschool.edu) 1 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics,... more
Spatial congruity effects reveal metaphors, not markedness Sarah Dolscheid 1,2 (sarah.dolscheid@mpi.nl) Cleve Graver 4 (gravc243@newschool.edu) Daniel Casasanto 3,4 (casasand@newschool.edu) 1 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, NL Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, Nijmegen, NL 3 Donders Center for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, NL 4 Department of Psychology, The New School for Social Research, New York, USA 2 International Abstract Spatial congruity effects have often been interpreted as evidence for metaphorical thinking, but an alternative markedness-based account challenges this view. In two experiments, we directly compared metaphor and markedness explanations for spatial congruity effects, using musical pitch as a testbed. English speakers who talk about pitch in terms of spatial height were tested in speeded space-pitch compatibility tasks. To determine whether space-pitch congruency effects could be elicited by...