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The importance of sensorimotor interactions with the environment to the development and structure of cognitive processes is now being taken seriously by an increasing number of cognitive scientists. An embodied cognition approach to the study of cognitive processing has been adopted by researchers examining such varied abilities as cognitive and motor development, mental imagery, memory, reasoning and problem solving, linguistic processing, metaphor processing, and concept formation (Clark, 1997;Gibbs, 2006;Glenberg, 1997;Lakoff & Johnson, 1999;Pecher & Zwaan, 2005;Wilson, 2002).In the research area of visual word recognition, it could be proposed that imageability effects (i.e., words with referents that can be easily sensed, such as peach, are recognized more rapidly and/or more accurately than words with referents that cannot be easily sensed, such as fraud) (e.g., Cortese, Simpson, & Woolsey, 1997;Strain, Patterson, & Seidenberg, 1995) are best understood from an embodied cognitive perspective. As a result of repeated sensory experience with certain objects or events, words that refer to these objects or events develop richer linguistic representations than do words that refer to objects or events with which humans have less sensory experience. According to an embodied cognitive perspective, an important component of the conceptual understanding of easily imageable words is the set of sensory representations that may be activated when linguistic processing occurs, resulting in faster and more accurate responses to these words in visual word recognition tasks.Barsalou and colleagues recently developed an embodied framework that they described as perceptual symbol systems theory (Barsalou, 1999(Barsalou, , 2003a(Barsalou, , 2003bBarsalou, Simmons, Barbey, & Wilson, 2003). According to this theory, many different modalities are involved in the acquisition and processing of conceptual knowledge. In addition to systems that have been well studied in cognitive psychology, such as cognitive systems (e.g., attention and language processing) and sensory systems (e.g., vision and olfaction), the theory suggests that less studied systems, such as motor, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive systems (e.g., grasping, manual manipulation, and internal feedback from muscles and joints) and emotional systems (e.g., fear and pleasure), are fundamental to concept formation and processing. Although knowledge acquired through these individual systems is at first processed in modalityspecific memory systems, it is eventually fed into hierarchical convergence areas where integration of the separate forms of information takes place (see also Damasio, 1989;Edelman & Tononi, 2000;Kandel, 2006;LeDoux, 2001). Accessing conceptual knowledge involves partial activation or simulation of the varied systems that were involved in the original encoding of the object or event. According to this perspective, sensory and motor knowledge gained via bodily experience with the environment is an important part of what is learned about concepts, and it is...

There is much empirical evidence that words’ relative imageability and body-object interaction (BOI) facilitate lexical processing for concrete nouns (e.g., Bennett et al., 2011). These findings are consistent with a grounded cognition framework (e.g., Barsalou, 2008), in which sensorimotor knowledge is integral to lexical processing. In the present study, we examined whether lexical processing is also sensitive to the dimension of emotional experience (i.e., the ease with which words evoke emotional experience), which is also derived from a grounded cognition framework. We examined the effects of emotional experience, imageability, and BOI in semantic categorization for concrete and abstract nouns. Our results indicate that for concrete nouns, emotional experience was associated with less accurate categorization, whereas imageability and BOI were associated with faster and more accurate categorization. For abstract nouns, emotional experience was associated with faster and more accurate categorization, whereas BOI was associated with slower and less accurate categorization. This pattern of results was observed even with many other lexical and semantic dimensions statistically controlled. These findings are consistent with Vigliocco et al.’s (2009) theory of semantic representation, which states that emotional knowledge underlies meanings for abstract concepts, whereas sensorimotor knowledge underlies meanings for concrete concepts.

Ratings of body-object interaction (BOI) measure the ease with which the human body can interact with a word's referent. Researchers have studied the effects of BOI in order to investigate the relationships between sensorimotor and cognitive processes. Such efforts could be improved, however, by the availability of more extensive BOI norms. In the present work, we collected BOI ratings for over 9,000 words. These new norms show good reliability and validity and have extensive overlap with the words used both in other lexical and semantic norms and in the available behavioral megastudies (e.g., the English ). In analyses using the new BOI norms, we found that high-BOI words tended to be more concrete, more graspable, and more strongly associated with sensory, haptic, and visual experience than are low-BOI words. When we used the new norms to predict response latencies and accuracy data from the behavioral megastudies, we found that BOI was a stronger predictor of responses in the semantic decision task than in the lexical decision task. These findings are consistent with a dynamic, multidimensional account of lexical semantics. The norms described here should be useful for future research examining the effects of sensorimotor experience on performance in tasks involving word stimuli.Keywords Body-object interaction . Lexical decision task . Semantic decision task . Sensorimotor processes . Word ratings . Word recognition In recent years, a great deal of research has explored the relationships between cognition and sensorimotor processing. This work has addressed important questions about how we learn, represent, and retrieve information about the world, and it has examined the extent to which cognition is grounded in our sensorimotor systems. Of particular relevance to the present work are studies that have investigated the role of sensorimotor information in language and cognitive processing by examining the effects of body-object interaction (BOI;