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Task-dependent motor representations evoked by spatial words

Embodied accounts contend that word meaning is grounded in sensory-motor representation. In support of this view, research has found rapid motor priming effects for words like eagle or shoe, which differ as to whether they are typically associated with an up or down spatial direction. These priming effects are held to be the result of motor representations evoked as an obligatory part of understanding the meaning of a word. In a series of experiments, we show that prime words associated with up or down spatial locations produce vertical perturbations in the horizontal movements of a computer mouse, but that these effects are contingent either on directing conscious attention to the spatial meaning of the word, or on the inclusion of the primed spatial direction in the response set, and that this is true even for strongly spatial words such as up and down. These results show that the motor representations associated with such words are not automatically evoked during reading. We discuss implications for claims that spatial representations reflect our embodied perception of the world. / Graduate

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/7243
Date02 May 2016
CreatorsAreshenkoff, Corson N.
ContributorsBub, Daniel, Masson, Michael E. J.
Source SetsUniversity of Victoria
LanguageEnglish, English
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
RightsAvailable to the World Wide Web

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