![]() More fundamentally, visual perceptions are likely coupled with bodily actions, and humans process meanings of visual symbols or objects by responding with appropriate body movements. In finger counting, the bodily actions are often spatially oriented relative to the horizontal (left/right) and vertical (top/bottom) axes, and these spatially dependent numerical axes are likely to be advantageous for the numerical recognitions (e.g., ). ![]() įinger counting, which clearly involves bodily actions, also conveys numerical concepts, and it supports people’s understanding of numbers, including arithmetical calculation. In a situation in which participants were prohibited from using gestures, their speech became less frequent, and when gestures and meanings of speech were not congruent, participants tended to produce more errors in conversation. Some experiments showed that participants produced gestures more than twice as frequently when they spoke about spatial topics as when they spoke about verbal or non-spatial topics. For instance, we use gestures to describe specific meanings such as shape, placement and motion in communication, and these gestural body movements are more frequently represented particularly when we express spatial concepts including directions, locations and motion in space (e.g., ). ![]() In other views, Barsalou argued that perceptual symbols are often modal and represented in the same way as they are perceived, so he proposed his perceptual symbol system, which integrates traditional theories with theories of embodied cognition.Įmpirically, embodied cognition has been tested to examine how the interactions between actions and cognition occurs. Mental processing needs to be understood as involving the interaction between a physical body activities and its environment. Metaphors such as “good is up” and “life is a gamble” have underlying spatial orientation, and structured experiences and activities, respectively, and these metaphors fundamentally include aspects of how people think and understand. Cognitive linguistics theories, for example, argue that abstract concepts are metaphorically based on embodied knowledge. So far, many theoretical studies have discussed embodied cognition from various points of view. These concepts focus on the embodiment of sensory and motor functions in cognition, and how the body modulates and shapes mental processing. The concepts of embodied cognition appear to oppose traditional views of human cognition, which posit that the mind as an information processor does not depend on the physical body. Our findings may thus reveal an example of embodied cognition in visual perception of traffic signals.Įmbodied cognition has been discussed widely during the last few decades in several fields, such as psychology, linguistics and philosophy. These results suggested that there was a possible association between certain action patterns and traffic symbol recognition, and in particular the “Go” symbol was congruent with a sliding action as a bodily response. ![]() We found that when operating the joystick, participants’ slide reaction in response to the “Go” traffic symbol was significantly faster than their push reaction, while their response time to the “Stop” signal showed no differences between sliding and pushing actions. Here we experimentally investigated how traffic symbol recognition cognitively affects bodily action patterns, by employing a simple stimulus-response task for traffic sign recognition with a response of either sliding or pushing down on a joystick in a gamepad. However, to what extent our bodily actions are associated with the symbolic representations of commonly used traffic signals remains unknown. The traffic signals are clearly thought to assist in producing bodily actions such as going forward or stopping, and the combination of symbolic recognition through visual perception and production of bodily actions could be one example of embodied cognition. Traffic signals, i.e., iconic symbols conveying traffic rules, generally represent spatial or movement meanings, e.g., “Stop”, “Go”, “Bend warning”, or “No entry”, and we visually perceive these symbols and produce appropriate bodily actions.
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