Valence activates motor fluency simulation and biases perceptual judgment

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• Emotional valence influences cognitive processes, including spatial attention and decision-making.
• Motor fluency, the ease of movement execution, is linked to positive affect.
• Previous research suggests a connection between emotion and spatial cognition.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if emotionally positive stimuli induce motor fluency simulation.
• To explore the impact of emotional valence on lateral space compatibility effects.
• To determine if motor fluency underlies the observed emotional-spatial interactions.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a perceptual line bisection task (Landmark task).
• Experiment 1: Participants verbally indicated the side of a vertical mark.
• Experiment 2: Participants indicated the longest side of a line.
• Emotional words (positive, negative, neutral) or no word served as primes.

Main Results:

• Positive words, compared to neutral or negative, biased responses toward the dominant side.
• This bias was observed in both right- and left-handers across both experiments.
• The effect remained consistent despite changes in task instructions.

Conclusions:

• Emotionally positive stimuli can induce a mental simulation of fluent lateral movements.
• This motor fluency simulation explains emotional valence compatibility effects in lateral space.
• The findings support a response selection bias mechanism rather than perceptual content alteration.