A motor-priming approach to embodied cognition: Forceful tests with numerical tasks

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Within the last two decades a growing community of cognitive psychologists focused on the role of our body during cognitive activities. To date hundreds of studies provide empirical evidence for this embodied cognition approach. However, the dynamics of motor contributions to cognitive activities are still ambiguous and theoretically underspecified. From a motor priming approach to embodied cognition we will use the testbed of numerical cognition in this follow-up project. The follow-up project manipulates spatial-numerical associations across three conceptual levels and compares resulting congruency effects to test predictions about the hierarchical embodiment of cognition in a domain of abstract knowledge. The arithmetic heuristics and biases model (AHAB; Shaki et al., 2018) will be specified by examining the time course of its component processes. Additionally, the proposal of hierarchical relations between grounded, embodied and situated knowledge representations (Fischer, 2012) will be used to derive predictions about the relative strengths of spatial biases. Our objective is to examine how specific movement features (force direction, intensity and frequency) influence performance on specific numerical tasks (single-digit arithmetic and random number generation) and vice versa. We improve our earlier approach in three important ways: by (1) exerting closer temporal control over the cognitive task components to improve insights into the timing of conceptual relative to motor activation; (2) contrasting vertical and horizontal spatial-numerical associations to address the general prediction of conceptual grounding in physical laws; (3) testing theories of generic vs. learned embodied effects using arm and leg movements and varying participants’ expertise. The project will be conducted cooperatively between our two research centers with complementary expertise and shared interests in problem solving and embodied cognition. The Potsdam group (Prof Fischer) studies abstract numerical and arithmetic problem solving from an embodied cognition perspective and has expertise in mental chronometry and force production. The Cologne group (Prof Raab) studies embodiment effects on various cognitive tasks, including gross motor tasks, and has additional expertise in motor control as well as access to specialist populations with arm or leg movement expertise. In short: The present project evaluates competing amodal and modal views on cognition by examining the temporal relationship between motor behavior and concept manipulation. We focus on a domain considered prototypical for abstract concept manipulation, namely numerical cognition and ask whether the calculating mind merely is a computer or whether it depends on its body.