Calendar of events

Title: Sensorimotor semantics: how perception and action experience shape high-level cognition

Abstract: The cognitive sciences view concepts as the heart of cognition, yet it remains a matter of debate how we mentally represent concepts as diverse as cat, affection, and calculus. Grounded theories of representation hold that the same neural systems engaged during perception and action experience are also engaged when meaning is processed during conceptual tasks, thus providing a grounding mechanism for semantic memory. However, the contribution of sensorimotor information beyond the senses of vision and hearing (and to a lesser extent touch and smell) is not well understood, nor is the role of sensorimotor information in grounding abstract concepts. By incorporating a multidimensional variety of perceptual experience from a range of distinct modalities and action experience from a range of distinct bodily effectors, and doing so at the full scale of adult semantic memory (approximately 40k lexical concepts), we have tested grounded theories of cognition across a broad variety of cognitive tasks. From semantic similarity to visual word recognition to categorical structure, we find that the sensorimotor experience underlying conceptual representations plays an essential role in both concrete and abstract domains. Overall, these findings suggest that sensorimotor grounding helps provide humans with a robust, flexible conceptual system, where the distinction between abstract and concrete concepts is not as clearcut as ontological assumptions might suggest.