To investigate the functional connection between numerical cognition and action planning, the authors required participants to perform different grasping responses depending on the parity status of Arabic digits. The results show that precision grip actions were initiated faster in response to small numbers, whereas power grips were initiated faster in response to large numbers. Moreover, analyses of the grasping kinematics reveal an enlarged maximum grip aperture in the presence of large numbers. Reaction time effects remained present when controlling for the number of fingers used while grasping but disappeared when participants pointed to the object. The data indicate a priming of size-related motor features by numerals and support the idea that representations of numbers and actions share common cognitive codes within a generalized magnitude system. Keywords: numerical cognition, action planning, generalized magnitude system, common representation, object graspingIn the last few decades, many authors have emphasized that cognitive representations of perceptual and semantic information can never be fully understood without considering their impact on actions (Gallese & Lakoff, 2005). In this context, interactions between perception and action have been extensively studied (for review, see, e.g., Hommel, Müsseler, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001). More recently, researchers also started to focus on the interactions between language and action (e.g., Gentilucci, Benuzzi, Bertolani, Daprati, & Gangitano, 2000;Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002;Lindemann, Stenneken, van Schie, & Bekkering, 2006;Zwaan & Taylor, 2006). However, a cognitive domain that has hardly been investigated in respect to its impact on motor control is the processing of numbers. This is surprising since information about magnitude plays an important role in both cognition and action. Accurate knowledge about size or quantity is required not only for high-level cognitive processes such as number comprehension and arithmetic (Butterworth, 1999; Dehaene, 1997) but also for the planning of grasping movements (Castiello, 2005;Jeannerod, Arbib, Rizzolatti, & Sakata, 1995). Since magnitude processing in mathematical cognition and magnitude processing in motor control have typically been studied independent of each other, little is known about possible interactions between these two cognitive domains.Interestingly, some authors have recently argued that the coding of magnitude information may reflect a direct link between number processing and action planning (Göbel & Rushworth, 2004;Rossetti et al., 2004;Walsh, 2003). This idea is so far primarily based on neuroimaging studies that have found an overlap in activated brain areas during processes related to numerical judgments and those related to manual motor tasks. In particular, the intraparietal sulcus has been suggested to be the locus of an abstract representation of magnitude information (for review, see Dehaene, Molko, Cohen, & Wilson, 2004). At the same time, it is widely agreed that this particular brain r...
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