Spatial Cognition (Psychology)

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"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it." --John Steinbeck Scientific research confirms what people have always known: answers, ideas, and inspiration do come to us in dreams. Harvard psychologist and world-renowned dream specialist Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., offers this rich collection of examples of how the world's most creative practitioners in art, music, film, science, literature and other fields have used the revelations of their dream life to inform their work. Dr. Barrett offers insights showing us how to encourage lucid, meaningful dreaming, and how to apply the meanings of our dreams to solving problems--from the everyday to the extraordinary. This is the stuff dreams are made of. In the visual arts, Jasper Johns couldn't find his unique artistic vision until he dreamed it in the form of a large American flag. Salvador Dali and his colleagues built the startling new genre of surrealism out of dreams. Kubla Kahn dreamed the design for his stately pleasure dome; thousands of years later, Lucy Davis, chief architect at a major firm, continues the tradition of dreaming designs into life in her extraordinary buildings. Film is a fertile avenue for dreams: "Twice I have transferred dreams to film exactly as I had dreamed them," confides director Ingmar Bergman, as have Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, and John Sayles. From Mary Shelley's terrible nightmare, which became Frankenstein, to Stephen King's haunting dream as a little boy, which led to his first bestseller, countless writers have consulted the Committee. Musicians from Beethoven to Billy Joel and Paul McCartney have whistled the Committee's tunes. In science, physiologist Otto Loewi dreamed the medical experiment that earned him the Nobel Prize. In sports, Marion Jones dreamed she'd broken a world record, then brought the dream to life. Gandhi translated his dream of resistance into a movement that changed the world. Since Freud, we take it for granted that our dreams reflect our past. In The Committee of Sleep, Barrett reveals how dreams can also tell us about our future potential--and how to reach it.

Official storage site: https://scholarbank.nus.edu.sg/handle/10635/47243
Also available on ResearchGate (click on links)

FOREWORD: This thesis presents finding from perspective-taking tasks (see Figs. 2 and 3) that were NOT published in Zhong & Kozhevnikov (2016).

ABSTRACT (Revised):
The current study proposed the existence of two subtypes of survey knowledge/representations: (i) “allocentric-survey” versus (ii) “egocentric-survey”. On one hand, the allocentric-survey representation was proposed as a third person representation abstracted/inferred from knowledge of landmarks, routes, and spatial relations between them. On the other hand, the egocentric-survey representation was proposed as a survey representation formed incrementally through an engagement of egocentric spatial updating, which involves the automatic and continuous updating of transient self-to-object relations as one navigates in space.

Findings from study 1 suggested that egocentric survey representations were qualitatively different from allocentric survey representations as the former preserved information not only about spatial locations, but also about orientation. Two groups of sketchmap drawers exhibited comparable accuracy in representing the spatial layout of the learned route. However, sketchers of egocentric-survey maps were significantly faster on orientation and navigational pointing judgments than sketchers of allocentric-survey maps.

In Study 2, a Navigational Strategy Questionnaire (NSQ) was designed. It included a novel scale assessing a preference for spatial updating navigational strategy and two traditional scales assessing survey based and procedural navigational strategies. Critically, the spatial updating scale exhibited predictive validity in relation to large scale navigational performance and related spatial updating strategy use to the formation of egocentric survey representations.

Nakh-Daghestanian languages have encountered growing interest from typologists and linguists from other subdiscplines, and more and more languages from the Nakh-Daghestanian language family are being studied. This paper provides a grammatical overview of the hitherto undescribed Sanzhi Dargwa, followed by a detailed analysis of the grammaticalized expression of spatial elevation in Sanzhi. Spatial elevation, a topic that has not received substantial attention in Caucasian linguistics, manifests itself across different parts of speech in Sanzhi Dargwa and related languages. In Sanzhi, elevation is a deictic category in partial opposition with participant-oriented deixis / horizontally-oriented directional deixis. This paper treats the spatial uses of demonstratives, spatial preverbs and spatial cases that express elevation as well as the semantic extension of this spatial category into other, non-spatial domains. It further compares the Sanzhi data to other Caucasian and non-Caucasian languages and makes suggestions for investigating elevation as a subcategory within a broader category of topographical deixis.

Much attention has recently been paid to the idea, which I label 'External World Acquaintance' (EWA), that the phenomenal character of perceptual experience is partially constituted by external features. One motivation for EWA which has received relatively little discussion is its alleged ability to help deal with the 'Explanatory Gap' (e.g. Fish 2008, 2009, Langsam 2011, Allen 2016). I provide a reformulation of this general line of thought, which makes clearer how and when EWA could help to explain the specific phenomenal nature of visual experience. In particular, I argue that by focusing on the different kinds of perceptual actions that are available in the case of visual spatial vs. colour perception, we get a natural explanation for why we should expect the specific nature of colour phenomenology to remain less readily intelligible than the specific nature of visual spatial phenomenology. (Forthcoming in Synthese.)

Try this simple experiment: close your eyes tightly, stand up, and walk to the other side of the room and back.You have just simulated for yourself what it is like to be blind. Well, not quite: there are several importantfactors missing. Firstly, you knew all along that you could open your eyes at any minute if you ran into trouble(e.g., a large hard obstacle). A blind person does not have that option for recovering from a mistake.Secondly, you almost certainly used your visually derived mental 'map' of the room's layout to guide you.Think how much harder it would have been to do the same thing in an unfamiliar room. Thirdly, you drew on aset of spatial concepts and orientation skills developed across your life-span that involved vision as a major unifying sense; the very first time you, as an infant, watched your hand as you reached out for an object, youwere already learning about space through vision.Even this experiment hardly brings you close to the everyday experience of someone who is totally,congenitally blind. Such a person has no visual memories of particular spaces, and has had no direct visual input into the development of their spatial understanding in general. Their experience of space comes fromhearing, touch and movement, and yet they can engage in pretty much all the activities that a sighted personcan. How is this possible when we, as sighted people, place so much importance on visual experience in our lives? Through theories and research in cognitive psychology and behavioural geography, this chapter willexplore the way(s) in which blind people experience and represent space. The first section will trace thehistory of thinking on the subject, the second will assess current work while the third will look to the future.

The single most important statement that can be made with regard to the logical status of human and physical geographical reasoning is that it belongs to the class of non-monotonic reasoning. In other words,  geographical reasoning is defeasible (i.e. earlier drawn conclusions can be defeated by the addition of new facts, some of which are generated by the very application of our ideas outside academe) and non-demonstrative (i.e. our beliefs about reality cannot be demonstrated once and for ever; we must do with building provisional arguments based on the current weight of the evidence, which itself changes with the times). Indeed, unlike mathematics, which is a closed world of formalisms that relies heavily on deduction, demonstration, and proof, geography studies and attempts to improve the real, messy world out there. Because that wild, unruly world is always in a process of becoming, the conclusions drawn yesterday may have to be abandoned today, and so on, without end in sight. The core virtue of geographical reasoning is not certainty, but adaptability. As the world changes, so do geography’s entertained beliefs about how to improve it. The point we are trying to make is that an alternative window into the nature of geographical reasoning, besides the one provided by the discipline’s key concepts, offers an opening toward the more subtle problematic of the mechanisms by which the updating of geographical beliefs operate.

"In this study a group of students who are unfamilar the urban pattern of an area are requested to draw the urban pattern of that area by using Lynch’s (1960) principal city image patterns. It explores which city images are predominantly used in visual memory of the students and also which drawing styles are used by the students to construct the area in their mind. Research findings show that predominantly used map style is sequential, and most of the students primarily identify and emphasize landmarks and paths. Furthermore, research findings also suggest that environmental perception develops and changes with time and the experience gained from construction of relationship with the space.

Keywords: Historical urban pattern, Mental map,Cognition, Environmental perception"

A new instrument, the Navigational Strategy Questionnaire (NSQ), was designed to assess individual difference on three scales measuring spatial updating, allocentric, and landmark-dependent navigational strategies. As existing navigational assessments usually measure procedural and survey knowledge acquired from navigation, this questionnaire includes a new scale measuring spatial updating strategy, which attempts to identify it as having cognitive processes distinct from those of other strategies that are recruited for the representational knowledge of large-scale environments. Principal component analyses revealed four independent factors: three of which clearly reflected the three aforementioned strategies, and an additional fourth factor evaluating map usage. All four scales of the NSQ demonstrated adequate internal and test-retest reliablilities. Based on sketch-map drawings which assessed the different types of environmental representations, illustrators of three-dimensional (3-D) sketch-maps portrayed accurate spatial configuration and topographical features, and scored the highest on the NSQ spatial updating scale. That implied a functional role of spatial updating in the formation of realistic spatial representations of large-scale environments as seen from the egocentric perspective. Further assessments using two spatial working memory tests provided convergent and discriminant validities for all four scales, and a virtual tunnel task demonstrated predictive validities for both spatial updating and allocentric scales.

Algunos estudios han demostrado que la posición del cuerpo humano influye en la percepción visual. De alguna manera, desde que por procesos evolutivos la percepción involucró aspectos propios de la gravedad, el ser humano pudo desarrollar un modelo interno multimodal sensorial y cognitivo referido a esta fuerza física. Dicho modelo está muy estrechamente ligado a la percepción visual, de modo que la percepción de las imágenes que aceptan dos posibles configuraciones perceptuales (llamadas imágenes biestables) se puede ver influenciada por la información que provee el sistema vestibular. En ese sentido, la orientación gravitacional del cuerpo humano debe ser estimada cuando un observador se enfrenta al proceso de decodificación de un estímulo visual. La percepción biestable está relacionada con habilidades cognitivas, en razón a que este tipo de percepción requiere de un procesamiento central que normalmente involucra las áreas prefrontal y parietal del cerebro humano. Este hecho puede ejercer una influencia en los saltos o cambios de configuración perceptual que se pueden manifestar, entendiendo que el estímulo biestable involucra dos posibles interpretaciones. El concepto de reversibilidad perceptual se hace presente cuando el observador experimenta un cambio entre una configuración perceptual y otra. Así, el número de cambios entre un percepto y otro es el número de reversibilidades perceptuales. Estas alteraciones perceptuales, que normalmente ocurren cuando se observaeuna imagen biestable, pueden depender tanto de la intención del observador por hacer dichas alternancias como del tipo de imagen biestable o ambigua que está siendo observada.

The mental rotation ability is an essential spatial reasoning skill in human cognition and has proven to be an essential predictor of mathematical and STEM skills, critical and computational thinking. Despite its importance, little is known about when and how mental rotation processes are activated in games explicitly targeting spatial reasoning tasks. In particular, the relationship between spatial abilities and Tetris TM has been analysed several times in the literature. However, these analyses have shown contrasting results between the effectiveness of Tetris-based training activities to improve mental rotation skills. In this work, we studied whether, and under what conditions, such ability is used in the Tetris TM game by explicitly modelling mental rotation via an ACT-R based cognitive model controlling a virtual agent. The obtained results show meaningful insights into the activation of mental rotation during game dynamics. The study suggests the necessity to adapt game dynamics in order to force the activation of this process and, therefore, can be of inspiration to design learning activities based on Tetris TM or redesign the game itself to improve its educational effectiveness.

"The conceptual metaphor theory states that abstract concepts are represented by image schemas from concrete domains. In the present study we investigated the mapping for SIMILARITY IS CLOSENESS using tasks with nonlinguistic materials. In Experiments 1 and 2 participants decided whether two squares were similar or dissimilar in colour. The spatial distance between the squares was varied. Performance to similar colours was better at shorter distances, whereas performance to dissimilar colours was better at longer distances. In Experiments 3 and 4 participants made distance decisions to similar and dissimilar colours squares. Performance was not affected by similarity. These results show that metaphorical mappings can be found even beyond the context of linguistic metaphors and that the mapping between SIMILARITY and CLOSENESS is
asymmetrical."

Most research on tactile maps has focused on aspects of map design and methods of construction. Relatively little attention has been paid to the way in which blind and visually impaired people actually use tactile maps for everyday way finding tasks. This paper reports on studies carried out in Madrid and Sheffield which consider how people gain spatial knowledge from tactile maps. In the Madrid study, participants were introduced to an urban area by one of three instructional methods: direct experience, tactile map or verbal description. Those who learned the area with the map were considerably more proficient in following the route unguided than were participants who received the other two instructional methods. However the different methods had little effect on the participants' overall representation of the space. It is possible that the map reading strategies used by the participants were effective for gaining practical route-based knowledge but did not give the participants an overall spatial representation of the area. To explore this possibility further, the Sheffield study considered the effect of individual differences in map reading strategies on the type of mental representation which visually impaired people acquire from a tactile map. It was found that those participants who acquired an accurate and full representation of the map used different map learning strategies from those who performed less well. We suggest implications of these studies for the education and rehabilitation of blind  and visually impaired people

This paper concerns the development of a new computational stochastic analysis in order to gain insight into situated vision in spatial environments. It is structured in three parts. The first two parts present the theoretical framework for the new model, based on the following propositions: firstly, that isovists are bound configurations containing one or more areas of spatial points that are intervisible; secondly, that
observers are capable of embodied projection in space, anticipating how relations seen from a position can be seen from other regions that are one step away from the current position, and building expectations about other spaces visible from these regions; and thirdly, that we need a method that describes isovists not as static units but as dynamic seeds for a global framework of knowledge. The final part of the paper
presents the new method with the following functionalities: a. continuous-time stochastic discretisation of space for isovist root selection and isovist generation; b. quantification of geometric isovists properties
based on successive isovist intersection; c. high resolution of isovist analysis; d. four quantitative isovist measures. These measures are discussed in hypothetical layouts and in the context of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House. The paper contributes a dynamic modelling technique to the discussion of diagrams and their capacity to represent embodied vision as actualised and virtually embedded possibilities, rather
than as static structures.

In spite of the growing body of research on frames of spatial reference, a number of important questions remain unanswered. This study explores reference frame use in Bashkir, based on a linguistic matching task and a nonverbal task. In the linguistic task, speakers relied freely on intrinsic and relative frames. In intrinsic descriptions, two different kinds of mapping were attested: a mapping based on the Ground's function, and a mapping based on the Ground's shape. Several factors were identified that affect the choice of linguistic description, including lexical choice, the chair's orientation with respect to the viewer, and the speaker's age. Interference from Russian was not a significant factor. The repair strategies speakers used when encountering misunderstanding suggest that they were not aware of the source of their difficulties. A number of previous studies reported, for different languages, a correlation between reference frame use in linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks, supporting the linguistic relativity hypothesis. The data from Bashkir shows no such correlation: nonverbal coding strategies did not correspond to the same individual's linguistic strategies, but correlated with the use of Russian in linguistic descriptions. I interpret this finding tentatively as pointing toward a mediated relationship between spatial cognition and language.

Gender differences are often seen as either biologically determined or culturally acquired or conditioned. However, in an age where gender equality is the main target, neither peer reviewers nor students show much interest in gender differences. Moreover, not only do people try to integrate their 'ying' and 'yang' in their personalities also transgender identities are publicly acknowledged, appreciated and respected. Thus, in this chapter, I argue that we need to downgrade gender differences to a statistical variable that explains variance, sharpens statistical effects and reveals strategies. I am giving examples from my developmental psychology research where the split-sample analysis by gender showed amazing and often unexpected effects.

In the past few decades, sex differences in spatial cognition have often been attributed to adaptation in response to natural selection. A common explanation is that home range size differences between the sexes created different cognitive demands pertinent to wayfinding in each sex and resulted in the evolution of sex differences in spatial navigational ability in both humans and nonhuman mammals. However, the assumption of adaptation as the appropriate mode of explanation was nearly simultaneous with the discovery and subsequent verification of the male superiority effect, even without any substantive evidence establishing a causal role for adaptation. An alternate possibility that the sex difference in cognition is a genetic or hormonal side effect has not been rigorously tested using the comparative method. The present study directly evaluates how well the range hypothesis fits the
available data on species differences in spatial ability by use of a phylogenetically based, cross-species, comparative analysis. We find no support for the hypothesis that species differences in home range size dimorphism are positively associated with parallel differences in spatial navigation abilities. The alternative hypothesis that sex differences in spatial cognition result as a hormonal side effect is better supported by the data.

Introduction: This paper outlines the basic concepts of mental space representations, its primary concepts and the connection to psychology and psychotherapy. Also included are the descriptions of three mental space based psychotherapies and their applications. A comprehensive list of references containing case-studies and researches is also provided for the three mental space based psychotherapies, for further study and research. Objectives: This paper aims at revealing the connection between the well-researched concepts of mental space and visual-spatial representations and their use and applicability in the psychotherapy and overall psychology field. Methods: Literature review. Results: The consideration of the importance of mental representations and their influence on the clients’ social world, and emotional problems and the further encouragement of developing tools and approaches that can work directly with this abstract constructs. Conclusions: This paper anticipates a new pa...

People revisit spatial locations of visually encoded information when they are asked to retrieve that information, even when the visual image is no longer present. Such " looking at nothing " during retrieval is likely modulated by memory load (i.e., mental effort to maintain and reconstruct information) and the strength of mental representations. We investigated whether words that are more difficult to remember also lead to more looks to relevant, blank locations. Participants were presented four nouns on a two by two grid. A number of lexico-semantic variables were controlled to form high-difficulty and low-difficulty noun sets. Results reveal more frequent looks to blank locations during retrieval of high-difficulty nouns compared to low-difficulty ones. Mixed-effects modelling demonstrates that imagery-related semantic factors (imageability and concreteness) predict looking at nothing during retrieval. Results provide the first direct evidence that looking at nothing i...

The Navigation Strategy Questionnaire (NSQ) [Zhong, 2013; Zhong & Kozhevnikov, 2016] contains three self-report scales assessing three types of strategies that are commonly employed when navigating our everyday environments on foot: (i) egocentric spatial updating strategy (ii) survey-based/allocentric strategy, and (iii) route/procedural strategy. An initial 60 items were generated to assess preference for egocentric spatial updating strategy from two traditional scales assessing preferences for procedural and survey-based strategies. Principal component analysis (PCA) with Varimax rotation resulted in a final set of 44 items. The egocentric spatial updating strategy scale (17 items) assesses path integration mechanisms (e.g., continuous tracking of self-motion and proximal object cues), an ego-referenced sense of direction, and the recruitment of egocentric frame(s) of reference during mental imagery. The survey-based strategy scale (12 items) assesses competence in cognitive mapping of routes and large-scale environments, and the formation of survey knowledge based on allocentric or environment-centered frames of reference. The procedural strategy (15 items) assesses visual attention to and memory for object/landmarks, and the reliance on object/landmark information for mentalizing routes of travel in a non-spatial/piecemeal or sequential fashion. To compute the respective scale scores, sum the ratings from the items that constitute each scale and average them. Non-desired items can also be discarded, whenever necessary, in the computation of the scale scores. [COPYRIGHT CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, J. Y. ZHONG 2013].

In everyday living, one of our most fundamental human needs entails in knowing the objects and places around us and having the capacity to freely roam about this environment. A great part of our lives is spent on travelling from one place to another, either within the same environment or between environments. This spontaneous activity stems from our adaptive needs to seek shelter, to find food, and to escape from harm's way. It is summarized by the word "navigation," which is characterized by the "planning of travel through the environment, updating position and orientation during travel, and in the event of becoming lost, reorienting and reestablishing travel towards the destination" (Loomis et al., 1999, p. 125). More precisely, navigation has been conceived to comprise of the behavioral component of locomotion, and the cognitive component of wayfinding (Montello, 2001, 2005). Locomotion refers to the physical movement from one place to another that is usually guided by vision. It is typified by activities such as steering, obstacle avoidance, and approaching objects. On the other hand, wayfinding involves the tactical and strategic aspects of navigation. It encapsulates decision-making or reasoning, route planning, and the formation of environmental representation for the exploration of places beyond the line of sight. With these definitions in mind, this paper addresses how individuals differ with regard to the environmental representations formed after travelling a novel route, and how different navigational strategies contribute to the formation of these distinct types of environmental representations.

Algunos estudios han demostrado que la posición del cuerpo humano influye en la percepción visual. De alguna manera, desde que por procesos evolutivos la percepción involucró aspectos propios de la gravedad, el ser humano pudo desarrollar un modelo interno multimodal sensorial y cognitivo referido a esta fuerza física. Dicho modelo está muy estrechamente ligado a la percepción visual, de modo que la percepción de las imágenes que aceptan dos posibles configuraciones perceptuales (llamadas imágenes biestables) se puede ver influenciada por la información que provee el sistema vestibular. En ese sentido, la orientación gravitacional del cuerpo humano debe ser estimada cuando un observador se enfrenta al proceso de decodificación de un estímulo visual. La percepción biestable está relacionada con habilidades cognitivas, en razón a que este tipo de percepción requiere de un procesamiento central que normalmente involucra las áreas prefrontal y parietal del cerebro humano. Este hecho pue...

Expérimental and brain imaging studies provide strong évidence for thé involvement of motor processes in spatial ability problems, such as mental rotation tasks. This study was designed to assess thé relationship between motor performance in sport and mental rotation problems solving. Elite and novice athlètes in varions sports completed two spatial ability tasks thé Mental Rotation Test (MRT Vandenberg & Kuse, 1978) and thé Movement Imagery Spécifie Test (MIST), sport spécifie training and MRT results (experiments 1 &• 2 Moreau, Clerc, Mansy-Dannay, Guerrien, 2010). If motor processes are décisive in spatial ability tasks, we shouldfind différences favoring individuals involved in activities that require complex motor skills. Interestingly, we found a significant relationship between sports performance, activity, sport-specific training and MRT results (experiment 1 &• 2). In addition, thé well-documented gender effect on thé MRT was confirmed (experiments 1 &• 2). Results also und...

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Previous neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies showed inconsistent findings concerning the involvement of the hippocampal formation in path integration, and the current study aimed to clarify this ambiguity. Specifically, this study investigated the extent to which the hippocampus proper, the entorhinal cortex, and neocortical regions were activated based on the implementation of continuous and configural updating strategies (one per participant) when performing a virtual path completion task. While configural updating required allocentric encoding of the outbound path’s shape, continuous updating required constant tracking of egocentric movements with reference to a point of origin.

Findings from in-lab behavioral testing (Experiment 1) showed that neither strategy elicited more accurate path integration performance than the other — and did not support previous findings showing that configural updating elicited higher performance accuracy when compared with continuous updating (He & McNamara, 2018; Wiener, Berthoz, & Wolbers, 2011). Despite these null effects, strategy use was found to be moderated by the sex of the participant: male configural updaters outperformed female configural updaters on almost all types of path integration errors, and female continuous updaters outperformed female configural updaters in terms of distance error measures. It is argued that the former findings reflected unique challenges on the part of female configural updaters with allocentric perspective-taking in the absence of idiothetic self-motion cues and that the latter findings reflected better spatial processing among female participants from an egocentric perspective concomitant with continuous updating strategy use than from an allocentric perspective concomitant with configural updating strategy use.

In Experiment 2, a subsample of the participants who completed Experiment 1 performed a new set of path integration trials in the fMRI scanner. The activation patterns of each strategy group were examined and compared based on whole-brain and region-of-interest (ROI) analyses, the latter of which encompassed the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. A within-trial ROI analysis of activation patterns showed that continuous updaters exhibited significant activation in the left entorhinal cortex based on a contrast of activations derived from simple and complex paths [complex > simple] during the homebound phase. Marginally significant activations in the left hippocampus in both strategy groups were also found based on ROI analysis and same type of descriptive contrast. In each strategy group, within-trial analysis at the whole-brain level further showed significant non-contrast-related patterns of activations (in the left parietal cortex) and deactivations (in the right medial prefrontal cortex and right lateral temporal lobe) during the homebound phase of simple paths. In addition, brain-behavior correlations associated individual differences in visual path integration with non-contrast-related functional activity changes in the occipito-parietal and inferior frontal regions, but not in the hippocampus or the entorhinal cortex.

Taken together, these fMRI findings suggest that extrahippocampal attentional and perceptual processes facilitated visual path integration, and that the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus may be more involved in detecting switches in homing decisions or responses between paths of varying complexity than in monitoring performance changes over a single category of paths.

We examine cross-linguistic influence in the processing of motion sentences by L2 users from an embodied cognition perspective. The experiment employs a priming paradigm to test two hypotheses based on previous action and motion research in cognitive psychology. The first hypothesis maintains that conceptual representations of motion are embodied by sensory and motor systems (Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002; Zwaan & Taylor, 2006) and predicts that linguistic descriptions of motion will be susceptible to conceptual priming effects. The second hypothesis assumes that the processing of fictive motion sentences, such as The road runs through the forest (cf. Talmy, 2000a), involves additional mental simulation of motion (Matlock, 2004b; Richardson & Matlock, 2007) and predicts that fictive motion will be processed more slowly than real motion. The participants were groups of Polish and English monolinguals and Polish L2 users of English, who were students in an English-medium university program. Sentence meaningfulness judgment and response time data were collected from the monolinguals and the L2 users tested in both languages. Sentence meaningfulness judgments were examined to see how the participants represent motion in language and response time data were analyzed for evidence of conceptual processing. The results showed expected differences in response times to various sentence types in all groups, but the priming effect was not observed in Polish monolinguals and only selectively present in the L2 users responding in both languages. The results of our experiment indicate that fictive motion processing is both embodied in physical experience of motion and modified by language.
(To view the article click on the link below:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2015.12178.x/pdf)