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Related Experiment Video

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Author Spotlight: Enhancing Neurorehabilitation Through EEG, Motor Imagery, and Virtual Reality

Author Spotlight: Enhancing Neurorehabilitation Through EEG, Motor Imagery, and Virtual Reality

Published on: May 10, 2024

Motor Imagery Shapes Abstract Concepts.

Juanma de la Fuente¹, Daniel Casasanto², Jose Isidro Martínez-Cascales¹

¹Mind, Brain, and Behavior Research Center, University of Granada.

Cognitive Science

|August 27, 2016

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Imagining hand impairment can reverse the association between space and emotion. Expecting fluent actions, not just performing them, influences whether good is linked to the right or left side.

Keywords:

Body specificity Conceptual metaphor Emotional valence Fluency Handedness Mental imagery

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Neuroscience
Spatial Cognition

Background:

Good-valence concepts are typically associated with the dominant hand's right side, linked to motor fluency.
This association is flexible and can be altered by changes in perceived motor fluency.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether the expectation of fluency, rather than actual motor experience, drives space-valence associations.
To determine if motor imagery alone can alter implicit spatial-valence mappings.

Main Methods:

Participants imagined performing a psychomotor task with an impaired hand, removing motor execution and perceptual feedback.
Implicit space-valence mapping was measured after the motor imagery task.

Main Results:

Imagining right-hand impairment led right-handed participants to associate "good" with the left side, mirroring left-handers' typical associations.
Motor imagery was sufficient to reverse established space-valence mappings.

Conclusions:

The expectation of fluent or disfluent actions, even without motor or perceptual experience, can shape implicit space-valence associations.
This suggests that cognitive factors like motor imagery play a crucial role in spatializing abstract concepts like "good" and "bad."
Reconsidering the mechanisms and boundary conditions of fluency effects in cognitive science.