When kids act out: a comparison of embodied methods to improve children's memory for a story

Over the last decade, embodied cognition, the idea that sensorimotor processes facilitate higher cognitive processes, has proven useful for improving children's memory for a story. In order to compare the benefits of two embodiment techniques, active experiencing (AE) and indexing, for children's memory for a story, we compared the immediate recall of different types of idea units across three conditions. Participants were between the ages of 7 and 11 and were randomly allocated to experimental conditions. The experimental groups were matched on comprehension ability and age. In the indexing condition, children acted out a short story using a playset (i.e., a Playmobil® playset with figurines), in the AE condition, children read the story using enactment, and during the control condition, children simply read the story. We predicted that children in the indexing condition would recall more action-based idea units, whilst children in the AE condition would recall more descriptive and dialogic idea units. Children in the AE condition recalled more descriptive idea units than in the control condition, whilst in the indexing condition, only poorer comprehenders recalled more descriptive information. Our findings suggest that these two embodiment techniques effect different components of reading comprehension and that future research should investigate these differences more specifically

Helping children think: Gaze aversion and teaching

Looking away from an interlocutor's face during demanding cognitive activity can help adults answer challenging arithmetic and verbal-reasoning questions (Glenberg, Schroeder, & Robertson, 1998). However, such `gaze aversion' (GA) is poorly applied by 5-year-old school children (Doherty-Sneddon, Bruce, Bonner, Longbotham, & Doyle, 2002). In Experiment 1 we trained ten 5-year-old children to use GA while thinking about answers to questions. This trained group performed significantly better on challenging questions compared with 10 controls given no GA training. In Experiment 2 we found significant and monotonic age-related increments in spontaneous use of GA across three cohorts of ten 5-year-old school children (mean ages: 5;02, 5;06 and 5;08). Teaching and encouraging GA during challenging cognitive activity promises to be invaluable in promoting learning, particularly during early primary years

To dash or to dawdle: verb-associated speed of motion influences eye movements during spoken sentence comprehension

In describing motion events verbs of manner provide information about the speed of agents or objects in those events. We used eye tracking to investigate how inferences about this verb-associated speed of motion would influence the time course of attention to a visual scene that matched an event described in language. Eye movements were recorded as participants heard spoken sentences with verbs that implied a fast (“dash”) or slow (“dawdle”) movement of an agent towards a goal. These sentences were heard whilst participants concurrently looked at scenes depicting the agent and a path which led to the goal object. Our results indicate a mapping of events onto the visual scene consistent with participants mentally simulating the movement of the agent along the path towards the goal: when the verb implies a slow manner of motion, participants look more often and longer along the path to the goal; when the verb implies a fast manner of motion, participants tend to look earlier at the goal and less on the path. These results reveal that event comprehension in the presence of a visual world involves establishing and dynamically updating the locations of entities in response to linguistic descriptions of events

Action in cognition: the case of language

Empirical research has shown that the processing of words and sentences is accompanied by activation of the brain's motor system in language users. The degree of precision observed in this activation seems to be contingent upon (1) the meaning of a linguistic construction and (2) the depth with which readers process that construction. In addition, neurological evidence shows a correspondence between a disruption in the neural correlates of overt action and the disruption of semantic processing of language about action. These converging lines of evidence can be taken to support the hypotheses that motor processes (1) are recruited to understand language that focuses on actions and (2) contribute a unique element to conceptual representation. This article explores the role of this motor recruitment in language comprehension. It concludes that extant findings are consistent with the theorized existence of multimodal, embodied representations of the referents of words and the meaning carried by language. Further, an integrative conceptualization of “fault tolerant comprehension” is proposed

When language gets emotional: irony and the embodiment of affect in discourse

Although there is increasing evidence to suggest that language is grounded in perception and action, the relationship between language and emotion is less well understood. We investigate the grounding of language in emotion using a novel approach that examines the relationship between the comprehension of a written discourse and the performance of affect-related motor actions (hand movements towards and away from the body). Results indicate that positively and negatively valenced words presented in context influence motor responses (Experiment 1), whilst valenced words presented in isolation do not (Experiment 3). Furthermore, whether discourse context indicates that an utterance should be interpreted literally or ironically can influence motor responding, suggesting that the grounding of language in emo- tional states can be influenced by discourse-level factors (Experiment 2). In addition, the finding of affect-related motor responses to certain forms of ironic language, but not to non-ironic control sentences, suggests that phrasing a message ironically may influence the emotional response that is elicited

Bend it like Beckham: embodying the motor skills of famous athletes.

Observing an action activates the same representations as does the actual performance of the action. Here we show for the first time that the action system can also be activated in the complete absence of action perception. When the participants had to identify the faces of famous athletes, the responses were influenced by their similarity to the motor skills of the athletes. Thus, the motor skills of the viewed athletes were retrieved automatically during person identification and had a direct influence on the action system of the observer. However, our results also indicated that motor behaviours that are implicit characteristics of other people are represented differently from when actions are directly observed. That is, unlike the facilitatory effects reported when actions were seen, the embodiment of the motor behaviour that is not concurrently perceived gave rise to contrast effects where responses similar to the behaviour of the athletes were inhibited

Synesthesia and release phenomena in sensory and motor grounding. Cases of disinhibited embodiment?

syndrome Synesthesia is an unusual condition occur-ring in at least 4 % of the population (Simner et al., 2006) in which certain stimuli trigger unusual perceptions which the physical properties of the stimulus alone are not sufficient to account for. For instance, in grapheme-color synesthe-sia, the sight of black-and-white printed letters or numbers triggers the experience of consistent and specific colors (e.g., A might be red, 7 yellow: Smilek et al., 2001). The associations reported by any given synesthete tend to be remarkably consistent over time (e.g., Simner et al.

Four applications of embodied cognition

This article presents the views of four sets of authors, each taking concepts of embodied cognition into problem spaces where the new paradigm can be applied. The first considers consequences of embodied cognition on the legal system. The second explores how embodied cognition can change how we interpret and interact with art and literature. The third examines how we move through archi- tectural spaces from an embodied cognition perspective. And the fourth addresses how music cogni- tion is influenced by the approach. Each contribution is brief. They are meant to suggest the potential reach of embodied cognition, increase the visibility of applications, and inspire potential avenues for research

Grip Force Reveals the Context Sensitivity of Language-Induced Motor Activity during “Action Words

Studies demonstrating the involvement of motor brain structures in language processing typically focus on \ud time windows beyond the latencies of lexical-semantic access. Consequently, such studies remain inconclusive regarding whether motor brain structures are recruited directly in language processing or through post-linguistic conceptual imagery. In the present study, we introduce a grip-force sensor that allows online measurements of language-induced motor activity during sentence listening. We use this tool to investigate whether language-induced motor activity remains constant or is modulated in negative, as opposed to affirmative, linguistic contexts. Our findings demonstrate that this simple experimental paradigm can be used to study the online crosstalk between language and the motor systems in an ecological and economical manner. Our data further confirm that the motor brain structures that can be called upon during action word processing are not mandatorily involved; the crosstalk is asymmetrically\ud governed by the linguistic context and not vice versa

Cognitive demands of face monitoring: Evidence for visuospatial overload

Young children perform difficult communication tasks better face to face than when they cannot see one another (e.g., Doherty-Sneddon & Kent, 1996). However, in recent studies, it was found that children aged 6 and 10 years, describing abstract shapes, showed evidence of face-to-face interference rather than facilitation. For some communication tasks, access to visual signals (such as facial expression and eye gaze) may hinder rather than help children’s communication. In new research we have pursued this interference effect. Five studies are described with adults and 10- and 6-year-old participants. It was found that looking at a face interfered with children’s abilities to listen to descriptions of abstract shapes. Children also performed visuospatial memory tasks worse when they looked at someone’s face prior to responding than when they looked at a visuospatial pattern or at the floor. It was concluded that performance on certain tasks was hindered by monitoring another person’s face. It is suggested that processing of visual communication signals shares certain processing resources with the processing of other visuospatial information