The Agent is Right: When Motor Embodied Cognition is Space-Dependent

Claudia Gianelli, Alessandro Farnè, Romeo Salemme, Marc Jeannerod and Alice C Roy

PLOS ONE, 2011, vol. 6, issue 9, 1-8

Abstract: The role of embodied mechanisms in processing sentences endowed with a first person perspective is now widely accepted. However, whether embodied sentence processing within a third person perspective would also have motor behavioral significance remains unknown. Here, we developed a novel version of the Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) in which participants were asked to perform a movement compatible or not with the direction embedded in a sentence having a first person (Experiment 1: You gave a pizza to Louis) or third person perspective (Experiment 2: Lea gave a pizza to Louis). Results indicate that shifting perspective from first to third person was sufficient to prevent motor embodied mechanisms, abolishing the ACE. Critically, ACE was restored in Experiment 3 by adding a virtual “body” that allowed participants to know “where” to put themselves in space when taking the third person perspective, thus demonstrating that motor embodied processes are space-dependent. A fourth, control experiment, by dissociating motor response from the transfer verb's direction, supported the conclusion that perspective-taking may induce significant ACE only when coupled with the adequate sentence-response mapping.

Date: 2011
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0025036

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0025036

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