A common neural substrate for perceiving and knowing about color

Simmons, W. Kyle; Ramjee, Vimal; Beauchamp, Michael S.; Masamune, Ken; Martin, Alex; Barsalou, Lawrence W.

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.05.002

Cited by 349 publications

(340 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…These embodied theories receive support from the observation that the duration of mental operations in mental rotation tasks or mental migration tasks is related to the duration of real-world operations (Kosslyn 1975(Kosslyn , 1980Shepard and Metzler 1971) and that cognitive states interact with body states and body postures (e.g., Harmon-Jones and Peterson 2009;Strack et al 1988;Wells and Petty 1980). Moreover, the activation of conceptual knowledge in memory involves brain areas that become especially active during perception and action (e.g., Heil et al 1997;Kiefer 2005;Simmons et al 2007). The finding of a common substrate for sensory-motor experiences and the memory of those experiences strengthens the idea of an interaction between external and internal processes and suggests that such sensory-motor representations are involved in representing knowledge (for an overview, see Barsalou 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Priming the mental time-line: effects of modality and processing mode

Rolke

Fernández²,

Schmid

et al. 2013

Cogn Process

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The notion of a mental time-line (i.e., past corresponds to left and future corresponds to right) supports the conceptual metaphor view assuming that abstract concepts like ''time'' are grounded in cognitively more accessible concepts like ''space.'' In five experiments, we further investigated the relationship between temporal and spatial representations and examined whether or not the spatial correspondents of time are unintentionally activated. We employed a priming paradigm, in which visual or auditory prime words (i.e., temporal adverbs such as yesterday, tomorrow) preceded a colored square. In all experiments, participants discriminated the color of this square by responding with the left or the right hand. Although the temporal reference of the priming adverb was task irrelevant in Experiment 1, visually presented primes facilitated responses to the square in correspondence with the direction of the mental time-line. This priming effect was absent in Experiments 2, 3, and 5, in which the primes were presented auditorily and the temporal reference of the words could be ignored. The effect, however, emerged when attention was oriented to the temporal content of the auditory prime words in Experiment 4. The results suggest that task demands differentially modulate the activation of the mental time-line within the visual and auditory modality and support a flexible association between conceptual codes.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Priming the mental time-line: effects of modality and processing mode

Rolke

Fernández²,

Schmid

et al. 2013

Cogn Process

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“…The multimodal associations in convergence zones (or simulators) can be partially activated during language comprehension, leading to neural reenactments (or simulations) that activate the same sensory and motor areas in our brain as were active when we directly experienced its referent. For example, the representation of the color red has recently been shown to activate the same visual areas in the brain when we directly perceive the color red, as when we think about it (Simmons et al, 2007). Studies like these provide support for the a-priori predictions derived from grounded theories of cognition.…”

Section: Overviewmentioning

confidence: 77%

“…De studies laten zien dat het nadenken over de kleur van een banaan hersengebieden in de visuele cortex activeert (Simmons, Ramjee, Beauchamp, McRae, Martin, & Barsalou, 2007), vergelijkbaar met de hersenactivatie die waar te nemen is als mensen daadwerkelijk naar een banaan zouden kijken. Een belangrijke vraag met betrekking tot de perceptuele representatie van concepten is hoe abstracte concepten gerepresenteerd worden.…”

Section: Discussionunclassified

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Abstract Concepts in Grounded Cognition

Lakens¹

2017

Preprint

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concepts in grounded cognitionAbstracte concepten in gegronde cognitie References 115 Summary in Dutch 133Curriculum Vitae 139 5 Introduction M orality, time, and valence are highly abstract concepts. Exactly how people are able to think and talk about abstract concepts is a question that has intrigued philosophers and scientists for centuries. In this thesis I focus on the question how people represent the meaning of abstract concepts, by investigating whether abstract concepts are understood through the use of metaphors. Metaphors allow people to think about abstract concepts in terms of concrete experiences. For example, the scales of Lady Justice are a metaphor for justice. People might not be able to see the future, but it can be represented as being ahead of us. Black knights in fairytales are usually evil, and the color of their armor is a metaphoric representation of the relation they have with the knights in shining armor. These and similar metaphors are not only used to intentionally communicate the meaning of abstract concepts, but these metaphoric representations also underlie abstract conceptual thought. How the meaning of abstract concepts is grounded in concrete experiences is the topic of this dissertation.Broadly speaking, two views exist on how abstract concepts are represented in our mind. On the one hand, amodal views share the common theme that people think in a purely symbolic language, where concepts 6 are represented as artificial symbols, and computational operations are performed upon these symbols during conceptual processing (Dennett, 1969;Fodor, 1975;Pylyshyn, 1984;Jackendoff, 2002). These artificial symbols are inherently non-perceptual; none of the original sensory or motor information from any modality (e.g., vision, touch, sound, smell, etc) which created these symbols is present when the final amodal symbols are used to represent concepts. On the other hand, several views on the representation of concepts have emerged over the last decennium which all share the idea that conceptual processing is perceptual in nature (e.g., Barsalou, 1999;Gallese & Lakoff, 2005;Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002;Jeannerod, 2001;Pulvermüller, 1999;Zwaan, 2004). According to these grounded approaches to cognition, conceptual thought consists of representations built on concrete sensorimotor information. For example, understanding the word 'kick' is assumed to depend at least in part on the activation of the muscles used to perform a kicking motion.As a result of the growing number of empirical studies that have investigated the role of sensorimotor activation in language comprehension, a consensus is emerging that sensorimotor areas in the brain are activated when people read words related to concrete concepts (Zwaan, 2009;Mahon & Caramazza, 2009;Vigliocco & Meteyard, 2008). For example, thinking about the color of a banana activates brain areas in the visual cortex (Simmons, Ramjee, Beauchamp, McRae, Martin, & Barsalou, 2007). Thinking about the color of a banana leads to remarkably similar pattern...

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“…The effectiveness of the presentation of color words on cognitive processing implies that the same or closely related associative areas in the brain might be involved in color word reading and color perception. From a neuropsychological point of view, this seems quite reasonable, as research shows that the same color processing brain regions are activated when actual colors as well as corresponding color words are presented (Moscoso del Prado Martín, Hauk, & Pulvermüller, 2006;Simmons, Ramjee, Beauchamp, McRae, Martin, & Barsalou, 2007).…”

Section: Red and Intellectual Performancementioning

confidence: 95%

Color in achievement contexts in humans

Meier¹,

Hill²,

Elliot³

et al. 2015

Handbook of Color Psychology

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Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. lightness, chroma, and hue. In this chapter we focus on the hue dimension, primarily on red, blue, and green, since experimental work has focused on these colors. Whilst the other two attributes are also crucial in color research, we do not highlight their significance in this chapter since lightness and chroma were (mostly) held constant across hue conditions in the research Research on nonhuman primates in competitive encounters indicates that red displays and other threat-relevant cues prompt avoidance by conspecifics, as indicated by submission and appeasement gestures and actions (Gerald, Waitt, & Little, 2008;Setchell & Wickings, 2005). In humans, encountering a negative object, event, or possibility, including the possibility of failure, is known to automatically evoke a motivational tendency to avoid that object, event, or possibility (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999;Cacioppo, Gardner, & Berntson, 1999). In addition, research has demonstrated that avoidance motivation in achievement settings evokes anxiety, task distraction, and a number of self-protective processes (e.g., disidentification, selfhandicapping; Birney, Burdick, & Teevan, 1969;Elliot & Church, 2003;Elliot & McGregor, 1999;Hembree, 1988;Osborne, 1995;Zuckerman, Kieffer, & Knee, 1998) that negatively influence performance on tasks requiring flexible mental manipulation (i.e., tasks commonly encountered at school and work). Accordingly, viewing red in an achievement context is posited to impair performance attainment because it evokes avoidance, which in turn, is inimical to performance. The activation, operation, and influence of avoidance motivation in this hypothesized red effect is thought to take place outside of conscious awareness; that is, it acts in an implicit rather than explicit fashion (see Friedman & Förster, 2010).Researchers have begun to explore such red associations in different variants of achievement situations, such as sporting contests, exam-like situations, and competence evaluations within impression formation scenarios. In the remainder of the chapter we provide an overview of empirical work on the effects of red on sport performance, cognitive mechanisms, behavioral processes, and psychophysiological activity in evaluative contexts. Red in evaluative contexts Red in sporting contextsExploring premise 2 and 4 of the CIC theory, several studies have investigated whether color has a psychological impact that influences performance and outcomes in sports. This work was ...

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A common neural substrate for perceiving and knowing about color

Cited by 349 publications

References 45 publications

Priming the mental time-line: effects of modality and processing mode

Priming the mental time-line: effects of modality and processing mode

Abstract Concepts in Grounded Cognition

Color in achievement contexts in humans

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