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Motor experience influences object knowledge
Evangelia G Chrysikou1, Daniel Casasanto2, Sharon L Thompson-Schill3
1Department of Psychology.
Journal of Experimental Psychology. General
|March 3, 2017
Summary
Motor experiences shape how we understand objects. Handedness and even changes in hand use, like after a stroke, alter object knowledge and retrieval speed.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Motor Control
- Psychology
Background:
- Object knowledge retrieval is influenced by perceived action readiness.
- Sensorimotor experiences may also impact object knowledge organization.
- The role of hand-specific motor history in object representation is underexplored.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if motor actions performed with hands influence stored and retrieved knowledge about graspable objects.
- To compare object representations between healthy individuals with different hand dominance.
- To examine object representations in stroke patients with altered motor experience.
Main Methods:
- Participants (healthy right/left-handers and unilateral stroke patients) viewed graspable objects.
- Objects were presented with handles oriented towards the left or right hand.
- Participants orally generated the type of grasp (clench or pinch) for each object.
Main Results:
- Hand dominance and object orientation significantly interacted to affect response times in both experiments.
- Right-handers showed faster judgments for objects oriented towards their right hand.
- Stroke patients demonstrated faster judgments for objects oriented towards their unaffected hand, regardless of prior dominance.
Conclusions:
- Object knowledge is significantly shaped by motor experience.
- Neurocognitive representations of objects can adapt to new patterns of motor experience.
- Bodily characteristics and interaction methods lead to distinct object representations.
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