Motor experience influences object knowledge.

Abstract

An object’s perceived readiness-for-action (e.g., its size, the degree of rotation from its canonical position, or the user’s viewpoint) can influence semantic knowledge retrieval. Yet, the organization of object knowledge may also be affected by body-specific sensorimotor experiences. Here, we investigated whether people’s history of performing motor actions with their hands influences the knowledge they store and retrieve about graspable objects. We compared object representations between healthy right- and left-handers (Experiment 1), and between unilateral stroke patients, whose motor experience was changed by impairment of either their right or left hand (Experiment 2). Participants saw pictures of graspable everyday items with the handles oriented toward either the left or right hand, and they generated the type of grasp they would employ (i.e., clench or pinch) when using each object, responding orally. In both experiments, hand dominance and object orientation interacted to predict response times. In Experiment 1, judgments were fastest when objects were oriented toward the right hand in right-handers, but not in left-handers. In Experiment 2, judgments were fastest when objects were oriented toward the left hand in patients who had lost the use of their right hand, even though these patients were right-handed prior to brain injury. Results suggest that at least some aspects of object knowledge are determined by motor experience, and can be changed by new patterns of motor experience. People with different bodily characteristics, who interact with objects in systematically different ways, form correspondingly different neurocognitive representations of the same common objects.

Hand Position and Response Assignment Modulate the Activation of the Valence‐Space Conceptual Metaphor

“…In so doing, we tried to increase the attention paid to the vertical axis while bringing to a minimum the salience of the horizontal dimension. Given that certain aspects of our knowledge and representation of objects seem to be determined by motor experience and the canonical position of objects, that is, the prototypical way we interact with them (Chrysikou, Casasanto, & Thompson-Schill, 2017), we hypothesized that a change in the conventional position of the response pad and the customary way participants use their hand to interact with it should attract attention to the new body-object spatial configuration enhancing the salience of the vertical axis and making it the only relevant spatial frame for the task. In this context, we predicted that the conceptual projection of valence onto vertical space would be favored provided that the response pattern that participants were assigned to was spatially congruent with the conceptual metaphors GOOD IS UP and BAD IS DOWN.…”

The China Image Set (CIS): A New Set of 551 Colored Photos With Chinese Norms for 12 Psycholinguistic Variables

“…For instance, compared to low-graspability objects, high-graspability objects were named faster (Guérard et al, 2015; Lorenzoni et al, 2018). Our explanation for the null result is that the effect of manipulation on object processing is mediated by manipulation experience, as evidence has indicated that the causal role of action information in objects' conceptual representations is established through manual experience (Yee et al, 2013; Chrysikou et al, 2017). The distribution statistics of manipulation experience, nevertheless, show that our participants had little experience in acting upon most of the objects in our dataset in spite of their high scores on manipulability.…”

“…The effect of manipulability on object recognition, however, is found to be mediated by the amount of manipulation experience associated with that object. The more experience we have in manipulating the object, the heavier role manual action plays in object representation (Yee et al, 2013; Chrysikou et al, 2017). Thus, we decided to include manipulation experience as another new variable in our image set.…”

Abstraction and concepts: when, how, where, what and why?

“…In other words, given that even as adults, the input that we receive changes as our experiences change in both the long and short term (e.g. via changes in our cultural, physical, or bodily environments, or in our knowledge or goals) our concepts should continue to change as well (for recent evidence of conceptual evolution due to changes in the body and knowledge, respectively, see Chrysikou, Casasanto, & Thompson-Schill, 2017;and Clarke, Pell, Ranganath, & Tyler, 2016; for review see Yee & Thompson-Schill, 2016).…”