From Affordances to Abstract Words: The Flexibility of Sensorimotor Grounding

Abstract

The sensorimotor system plays a critical role in several cognitive processes. Here, we review recent studies documenting this interplay at different levels. First, we concentrate on studies that have shown how the sensorimotor system is flexibly involved in interactions with objects. We report evidence demonstrating how social context and situations influence affordance activation, and then focus on tactile and kinesthetic components in body–object interactions. Then, we turn to word use, and review studies that have shown that not only concrete words, but also abstract words are grounded in the sensorimotor system. We report evidence that abstract concepts activate the mouth effector more than concrete concepts, and discuss this effect in light of studies on adults, children, and infants. Finally, we pinpoint possible sensorimotor mechanisms at play in the acquisition and use of abstract concepts. Overall, we show that the involvement of the sensorimotor system is flexibly modulated by context, and that its role can be integrated and flanked by that of other systems such as the linguistic system. We suggest that to unravel the role of the sensorimotor system in cognition, future research should fully explore the complexity of this intricate, and sometimes slippery, relation.

Concepts for Which We Need Others More: The Case of Abstract Concepts

“…Consistent with this view is the considerable evidence that, at least for spoken languages, the mouth motor system is engaged more significantly during processing of abstract compared with concrete words (for a review of studies conducted in my lab, see Mazzuca et al, 2021). Participants rate words referring to abstract concepts as evoking more mouth than hand actions, whereas the opposite is true for concrete concepts.…”

“…(This happens, e.g., when a scientist feels that a word needs a better definition.) Hence, social metacognition might be an asymmetrical process, in which we ask competent others for information, or a symmetrical process, in which we redefine the word meaning together with other people (Mazzuca et al, 2021). During both metacognition and social metacognition, we might activate inner speech (and thus possibly activate the mouth motor system).…”

“…These dimensions are weighted differently for different abstract concepts; for example, interoception is more important for emotion than for other abstract concepts, and linguistic modality of acquisition is more crucial for philosophical-spiritual concepts than for other abstract concepts (Villani et al, 2019). My colleagues and I have found that the weight of these dimensions is dynamically influenced by the context and the individual’s expertise (for a review, see Mazzuca et al, 2021). We recently identified another dimension characterizing abstract concepts, which we named social metacognition.…”

Bodily, emotional, and public sphere at the time of COVID-19. An investigation on concrete and abstract concepts

“…In keeping with that, along with classic dimensions explaining concreteness and abstractness (i.e., Contextual Availability, Imageability), we found this distinction is further enriched by the association between abstractness and Social Metacognition, i.e., the tendency to rely on others to understand conceptual meaning. Some research strands propose that this dimension might be critical for abstract concepts’ acquisition and mastering (e.g., Borghi et al, 2018 , 2021 ; Mazzuca et al, 2021a ). In line with this proposal, abstract conceptual representations might be established and reinforced also through a dynamic loop constituted by the conscious or unconscious assessment of the inadequacy of our conceptual knowledge, and the consequent social interactions aimed at integrating and enriching it.…”

Kinesthetic motor-imagery training improves performance on lexical-semantic access

“…Conversely, it could be that the KMI training, and the consequent motor-cortex activation, resulted rather in an interference effect than a facilitation during the processing of action verbs, especially considering the effects of context on affordance activation. For instance, tasks and their different stimuli lead to different activations depending on the context and on the goal of the participant [72]. Affordances also vary depending on ownership [72], and the stimuli used in the sentence-picture matching task all included sentences referring to a third person represented in the pictures, which rather rely on the comprehension of action and action goals of others [72].…”