Fictive motion as cognitive simulation

Abstract

Sentences such as The road runs through the valley and The mountain range goes from Canada to Mexico include a motion verb but express no explicit motion or state change. It is argued that these sentences involve fictive motion, an implicit type of motion. But do people trying to understand these sentences mentally simulate motion? This question was addressed in four experiments. In each, participants read a story about travel--for instance, fast versus slow, short versus long distance, and easy versus difficult terrain--and then made a timed decision about a fictive motion sentence. Overall, latencies were shorter after they had read about fast travel, short distances, and easy terrains. Critically, the effect did not arise with nonfictive motion target sentences (e.g., The road is in the valley), as was demonstrated in three control studies. The results suggest that the processing of fictive motion includes mental simulation.

Mirror neurons and the social nature of language: The neural exploitation hypothesis

“…These latter results extend the role of action simulation to the understanding of sentences describing abstract situations. Similar consistent results were recently published by other authors (Borghi, Glenberg, & Kaschak, 2004;Matlock, 2004).…”

Language-guided visual processing affects reasoning: The role of referential and spatial anchoring

“…Further, if we assume an analogy with findings from the visual-processing literature that there is no cost involved in shifting attention between object parts but that there is a cost in shifting attention between objects (Egly, Driver, & Rafal, 1994;Lamy & Egeth, 2002), we may see why the eyes switch easier that is, earlier from the first to the second picture in conjunction trials than in disjunction trials. Our assumption is warranted by previous findings by Matlock (2004) and by Richardson and Matlock (2007) among others, that eye movements are modulated by the mental representations which are currently active, thus triggered by language descriptions.…”

“…As shown in Matlock (2004) and in Richardson and Matlock (2007), the eyes may scan the same drawing e.g., a road amid palm trees differently, according to whether the accompanying sentence featured a fictive-motion verb (The road goes through the desert) or a static verb (The road is in the desert) and according to whether the terrain had been previously described as being easy (The desert is flat) or difficult (The desert is hilly). Second, incremental processing may lead people to anticipate a match between words and visual stimuli and identify a relevant target before being mentioned.…”

An Embodied Account of Argument Structure Development

“…However, a number of lines of research-in cognitive neuroscience (Dourish, 2001), in behavioral studies of adult cognition (Barsalou, 2003;Wilson, 2002), in philosophy and linguistics (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), and in robotics (Anderson, 2003)-suggest that language and cognition are embedded in and not entirely distinct from the processes of feeling, perceiving and acting. This hypothesis, generally referred to as Embodied Cognition, is the idea that cognition is embodied, meaning that cognition, including language, derives from the experiences in the real world that come from the body's interaction with the environment through the perceptual and motor modalities There are many different positions on what embodiment is, with respect to meaning and representation (Anderson, 2003;Wilson, 2002;Ziemke, 2001)-including the view that even abstract concepts are influenced by perception-action in a dynamic world (e.g., Landy & Goldstone, 2007), perhaps via metaphors related to more concrete meanings (e.g., Matlock, 2004). Indeed, body parts have been found to often be used for this type of "grounding", that is, as a metaphor framing many abstract semantic domains, such as number, space, and emotion, in terms of body parts and physical world experience (de Leon, 1994;Saxe, 1981;Yu, 2004).…”