In this study we carried out a behavioral experiment comparing action language comprehension in L1 (Italian) and L2 (English). Participants were Italian native speakers who had acquired the second ...language late (after the age of 10). They performed semantic judgments on L1 and L2 literal, idiomatic and metaphorical action sentences after viewing a video of a hand performing an action that was related or unrelated to the verb used in the sentence. Results showed that responses to literal and metaphorical L1 sentences were faster when the action depicted was related to the verb used rather than when the action depicted was unrelated to the verb used. No differences were found for the idiomatic condition. In L2 we found that all responses to the three conditions were facilitated when the action depicted was related to the verb used. Moreover, we found that the difference between the unrelated and the related modalities was greater in L2 than in L1 for the literal and the idiomatic condition but not for the metaphorical condition. These findings are consistent with the embodied cognition hypothesis of language comprehension.
Behavior is guided by the compatibility of expectations based on past experience and the outcome. In a recent study, Fouragnan and colleagues report that absolute prediction error (PE)-related ...heart-evoked potentials (HEPs) differ according to the cardiac cycle phase at outcome, and that the magnitude of this effect positively correlates with reward learning in healthy adults.
Behavior is guided by the compatibility of expectations based on past experience and the outcome. In a recent study, Fouragnan and colleagues report that absolute prediction error (PE)-related heart-evoked potentials (HEPs) differ according to the cardiac cycle phase at outcome, and that the magnitude of this effect positively correlates with reward learning in healthy adults.
This concise volume addresses the question of whether or not language, and its structure in literary discourses, determines individuals’ mental "vision," employing an innovative cross-disciplinary ...approach using readers’ drawings of their mental imagery during reading. The book engages in critical dialogue with the perceived wisdom in stylistics rooted in Roger Fowler’s seminal work on deixis and point of view to test whether or not this theory can fully account for what readers see in their mind's eye and how they see it. The work draws on findings from a study of English and Dutch across a range of literary texts, in which participants read literary text fragments and were then asked to immediately draw representations of what they had seen envisioned. Building on the work of Fowler and more recent theoretical and empirical language-based studies in the area, Klomberg, Schilhab, and Burke argue that models from embodied cognitive science can help account for anomalies in evidence from readers’ drawings, indicating new ways forward for interdisciplinary understandings of individual meaning construction in literary textual interfaces. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in stylistics, cognitive psychology, rhetoric, and philosophy, particularly those working in the field of embodied cognition.
Drawing on the theory of affordance, we conceptualize affordance actualization for the metaverse games (MG) relative to the affordances of internalized and embodied experiences by users. Focusing on ...MG players' affordances, we examine how they affect the user experience by exploring how affordances are realized and enacted in an extended environment. Based on mixed methods of empirical analysis, we identify relevant affordances, theorize affordance actualization, and characterize the duality of affordance in the metaverse. A heuristic process of immersion and selection of affordances through underlying cues together actualize a player's sensory representations of affective affordances. By identifying how extended reality mediates interactions with users, we contribute to prescriptive knowledge in the form of theoretical considerations and practical implications intended for academics and practitioners working in the context of the extended environment. We propose that affordance actualization helps to theorize the duality of affordance in the metaverse that users shape their metaverse based on their actualized affordance, and at the same time, the metaverse becomes a part of the structure shaping and constraining user actions.
•How users actualize affordances with extended reality games.•Mixed methods of empirical analysis explicate the structure and process of the affordance matrix.•Theorize affordance actualization in extended reality by distinguishing instrumental and affective affordance.•A model that defines the process by which affordances evolved out of the interactions between users and extended reality.
Williams and Bargh (2008) reported that holding a hot cup of coffee caused participants to judge a person’s personality as warmer and that holding a therapeutic heat pad caused participants to choose ...rewards for other people rather than for themselves. These experiments featured large effects ( r = .28 and .31), small sample sizes (41 and 53 participants), and barely statistically significant results. We attempted to replicate both experiments in field settings with more than triple the sample sizes (128 and 177) and double-blind procedures, but found near-zero effects ( r = −.03 and .02). In both cases, Bayesian analyses suggest there is substantially more evidence for the null hypothesis of no effect than for the original physical warmth priming hypothesis.
Although in the last three decades philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists have produced numerous studies on human cognition, the debate concerning its nature is still heated and current ...views on the subject are somewhat antithetical. On the one hand, there are those who adhere to a view implying ‘disembodiment’ which suggests that cognition is based entirely on symbolic processes. On the other hand, a family of theories referred to as the Embodied Cognition Theories (ECT) postulate that creating and maintaining cognition is linked with varying degrees of inherence to somatosensory and motor representations. Spinal cord injury induces a massive body-brain disconnection with the loss of sensory and motor bodily functions below the lesion level but without directly affecting the brain. Thus, SCI may represent an optimal model for testing the role of the body in cognition. In this review, we describe post-lesional cognitive modifications in relation to body, space and action representations and various instances of ECT. We discuss the interaction between body-grounded and symbolic processes in adulthood with relevant modifications after body-brain disconnection.
•Scarce childhood resources lead to preferences for bright stimuli.•This effect is mediated by the desire for bright future.•This effect is mitigated when dark stimuli symbolize future brightness.
A ...significant number of children live in poverty, even in modern society. Can the conditions of childhood resources affect one’s decision-making in adulthood? This research documents a novel effect of childhood resources on sensory preferences as adults. Drawing on the compensatory consumer behavior theory, we proposed and found that people suffering from scarce childhood resources exhibit stronger preferences for bright stimuli in adulthood. The underlying mechanism for this effect is the desire for a bright future. Moreover, when individuals are reminded of the positive symbolic meanings associated with darkness, the effect of childhood resources on sensory preference is attenuated. A set of three experiments provided convergent evidence for these effects. Implications of these findings and possible extensions are discussed.
The shift from print to screen has bodily effects on how we read. We distinguish two dimensions of embodied reading: the spatio-temporal and the imaginary. The former relates to what the body does ...during the act of reading and the latter relates to the role of the body in the imagined scenarios we create from what we read. At the level of neurons, these two dimensions are related to how we make sense of the world. From this perspective, we explain how the bodily activity of reading changes from print to screen. Our focus is on the decreased material anchoring of memories.
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