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      Sensorimotor and interoceptive dimensions in concrete and abstract concepts

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          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Highlights

          • •

            Sub-kinds of abstract and concrete concepts rely on different grounding sources.

          • •

            Performing secondary tasks led to interference effects during conceptual processing.

          • •

            Mouth activation reduces interference with concrete and physical abstract concepts.

          • •

            Manipulating an object interferes mostly with the concrete concepts of tools.

          • •

            Interoceptive signals interferes with the most abstract and emotions-social concepts.

          Abstract

          Recent theories propose that abstract concepts, compared to concrete ones, might activate to a larger extent interoceptive, social and linguistic experiences. At the same time, recent research has underlined the importance of investigating how different sub-kinds of abstract concepts are represented. We report a pre-registered experiment, preceded by a pilot study, in which we asked participants to evaluate the difficulty of 3 kinds of concrete concepts (natural objects, tools, and food concepts) and abstract concepts (Philosophical and Spiritual concepts, PS, Physical Space Time and Quantity concepts, PSTQ, and Emotional, Mental State and Social concepts, EMSS). While rating the words, participants were assigned to different conditions designed to interfere with conceptual processing: they were required to squeeze a ball (hand motor system activation), to chew gum (mouth motor system activation), to self-estimate their heartbeats (interoception), and to perform a motor articulatory task (inner speech involvement). In a control condition they simply rated the difficulty of words. A possible interference should result in the increase of the difficulty ratings. Bayesian analyses reveal that, compared to concrete ones, abstract concepts are more grounded in interoceptive experience and concrete concepts less in linguistic experience (mouth motor system involvement), and that the experience on which different kinds of abstract and concrete concepts differs widely. For example, within abstract concepts interoception plays a major role for EMSS and PS concepts, while the ball squeezing condition interferes more for PSTQ concepts, confirming that PSTQ are the most concrete among abstract concepts, and tap into sensorimotor manual experience. Implications of the results for current theories of conceptual representation are discussed.

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          How Many Subjects Does It Take To Do A Regression Analysis.

          S Green (1991)
          Numerous rules-of-thumb have been suggested for determining the minimum number of subjects required to conduct multiple regression analyses. These rules-of-thumb are evaluated by comparing their results against those based on power analyses for tests of hypotheses of multiple and partial correlations. The results did not support the use of rules-of-thumb that simply specify some constant (e.g., 100 subjects) as the minimum number of subjects or a minimum ratio of number of subjects (N) to number of predictors (m). Some support was obtained for a rule-of-thumb that N ≥ 50 + 8 m for the multiple correlation and N ≥104 + m for the partial correlation. However, the rule-of-thumb for the multiple correlation yields values too large for N when m ≥ 7, and both rules-of-thumb assume all studies have a medium-size relationship between criterion and predictors. Accordingly, a slightly more complex rule-of thumb is introduced that estimates minimum sample size as function of effect size as well as the number of predictors. It is argued that researchers should use methods to determine sample size that incorporate effect size.
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            Analyzing ordinal data with metric models: What could possibly go wrong?

            Torrin Liddell, John K. Kruschke (2018)
            Article 0 comments Cited 113 times – based on 0 reviews     Review now
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              The neural representation of abstract words: the role of emotion.

              D Vinson, Pasquale Anthony Della Rosa, Gabriella Vigliocco … (2014)
              It is generally assumed that abstract concepts are linguistically coded, in line with imaging evidence of greater engagement of the left perisylvian language network for abstract than concrete words (Binder JR, Desai RH, Graves WW, Conant LL. 2009. Where is the semantic system? A critical review and meta-analysis of 120 functional neuroimaging studies. Cerebral Cortex. 19:2767-2796; Wang J, Conder JA, Blitzer DN, Shinkareva SV. 2010. Neural representation of abstract and concrete concepts: A meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies. Hum Brain Map. 31:1459-1468). Recent behavioral work, which used tighter matching of items than previous studies, however, suggests that abstract concepts also entail affective processing to a greater extent than concrete concepts (Kousta S-T, Vigliocco G, Vinson DP, Andrews M, Del Campo E. The representation of abstract words: Why emotion matters. J Exp Psychol Gen. 140:14-34). Here we report a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment that shows greater engagement of the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, an area associated with emotion processing (e.g., Etkin A, Egner T, Peraza DM, Kandel ER, Hirsch J. 2006. Resolving emotional conflict: A role for the rostral anterior cingulate cortex in modulating activity in the amygdala. Neuron. 52:871), in abstract processing. For abstract words, activation in this area was modulated by the hedonic valence (degree of positive or negative affective association) of our items. A correlation analysis of more than 1,400 English words further showed that abstract words, in general, receive higher ratings for affective associations (both valence and arousal) than concrete words, supporting the view that engagement of emotional processing is generally required for processing abstract words. We argue that these results support embodiment views of semantic representation, according to which, whereas concrete concepts are grounded in our sensory-motor experience, affective experience is crucial in the grounding of abstract concepts. © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
              Article 0 comments Cited 106 times – based on 0 reviews     Review now
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Journal ID (nlm-ta): J Mem Lang
                Journal ID (iso-abbrev): J Mem Lang
                Title: Journal of Memory and Language
                Publisher: Elsevier Inc.
                ISSN (Print): 0749-596X
                ISSN (Electronic): 1096-0821
                Publication date PMC-release: 16 September 2020
                Publication date (Print): February 2021
                Publication date (Electronic): 16 September 2020
                Volume: 116
                Page: 104173
                Affiliations
                [a ]Department of Philosophy and Communication, University of Bologna, via Azzo Gardino, 23, Bologna 40122, Italy
                [b ]Department of Medical and Surgery Sciences, University of Catanzaro, Viale Europa (Loc. Germaneto), Catanzaro 88100, Italy
                [c ]Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Via degli Apuli 1, Roma 00185, Italy
                [d ]Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Italian National Research Council, Via San Martino della Battaglia 44, Roma 00185, Italy
                Author notes
                [* ]Corresponding authors at: Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Via degli Apuli 1, Roma 00185, Italy (A.M. Borghi).
                Article
                Publisher ID: S0749-596X(20)30087-5 Publisher ID: 104173
                DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2020.104173
                PMC ID: 7492812
                PubMed ID: 32952286
                SO-VID: 66245d4f-bc54-4761-b200-463243f73de6
                Copyright © © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
                License:

                Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

                History
                Date received : 30 October 2019
                Date revision received : 16 August 2020
                Date accepted : 20 August 2020
                Categories
                Subject: Article

                Keywords: abstract and concrete concepts,mouth motor system,hand motor system,interoception,motor interference,embodied and grounded cognition
                Data availability:
                Keywords: abstract and concrete concepts, mouth motor system, hand motor system, interoception, motor interference, embodied and grounded cognition

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