Abstract
Recent research has found that spatial mechanisms of action-perception processes contribute to concept formation through simulation, such that conceptual processes can affect perceptual processes (Barsalou, 2003). While the effects of simulation on perception have been found with concrete (Estes et al., 2008) and metaphorical (Gozli et al., in press) conceptual words, the present research focuses on the contribution of spatial mechanisms to internal representation of other people. To accomplish this, participants were given three short stories containing two protagonists, one of whom was doing very well and another that was struggling. In the first experiment, each story was followed by a visual discrimination task in which one of four cue names appeared at fixation (the positive protagonist, the negative protagonist, and two new names) followed by a target (X or O) that appeared either above or below the name. Participants identified the target letter as quickly as possible with a keypress when the cue name was one that occurred in the previous story. Consistent with a simulation account, processing names interfered with target processing at the metaphorically compatible location (e.g., target appeared above following the positive name at fixation). In the second experiment, after each of the stories, one the four names appeared either above or below the fixation point and participants were asked to determine if the name had been used in the previous story as quickly as possible. As predicted by simulation, positive names were responded to more quickly when presented in upper space with negative names faster in lower space. The findings of these experiments show that internally-generated simulations of other people who are associated with success or failure recruits mechanisms of visual-spatial attention. This study provides striking further evidence for the strong connections between conceptual processes and the mechanisms of action-perception.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013