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Sentence comprehension and action: Effector specific modulation of the motor system
No full textAbstract
The purpose of the paper is to study whether sentence comprehension modulates the motor system. Participants were presented with 24 pairs of nouns and verbs that could be referred to hand and mouth actions (e.g., to unwrap vs. to suck the sweet), in the first block, or, in the second block, to 24 hand and foot actions (e.g., to throw vs. kick the ball). An equal number of non sensible pairs were presented. Participants’ task consisted of deciding whether the combination made sense or not: 20 participants responded by saying yes loudly into a microphone, 20 by pressing a pedal. Results support embodied theories of language comprehension, as they suggest that sentence processing activates an action simulation. This simulation is quite detailed, as it is sensitive to the effector involved. Namely, it lead to a facilitation in responses to ‘mouth sentences’ and ‘foot sentences’ compared to ‘hand sentences’ in case of congruency between the effectors – mouth and foot – involved in the motor response and in the sentence
Evaluating Human Aesthetic and Emotional Aspects of 3D generated content through eXtended Reality
Full text linkThe Metaverse era is rapidly shaping novel and effective tools particularly useful in the entertainment and creative industry. A fundamental role is played by modern generative deep learning models, that can be used to provide varied and high-quality multimedia content, considerably lowering costs while increasing production efficiency. The goodness of such models is usually evaluated quantitatively with established metrics on data and humans using simple constructs such as the Mean Opinion Score. However, these scales and scores don't take into account the aesthetical and emotional components, which could play a role in positively controlling the automatic generation of multimedia content while at the same time introducing novel forms of human-in-the-loop in generative deep learning. Furthermore, considering data such as 3D models/scenes, and 360° panorama images and videos, conventional display hardware may not be the most effective means for human evaluation. A first solution to such a problem could consist of employing eXtendend Reality paradigms and devices. Considering all such aspects, we here discuss a recent contribution that adopted a well-known scale to evaluate the aesthetic and emotional experience of watching a 360° video of a musical concert in Virtual Reality (VR) compared to a classical 2D webstream, showing that adopting fully immersive VR experience could be a possible path to follow
Cues of control modulate the ascription of object ownership
Full text linkKnowing whether an object is owned and by whom is essential to avoid costly conflicts. We hypothesize that everyday interactions around objects are influenced by a minimal sense of object ownership grounded on respect of possession. In particular, we hypothesize that tracking object ownership can be influenced by any cue that predicts
the establishment of individual physical control over objects. To test this hypothesis we used an indirect method to determine whether visual cues of physical control like spatial proximity to an object, temporal priority in seeing it, and touching it influence this minimal sense of object ownership. In Experiment 1 participants were shown neutral object located on a table, in the reaching space of one of two characters. In Experiment 2 one character found the object first; then another character appeared and saw the object. In Experiments 3 and 4, spatial proximity, temporal priority, and touch are pitted against each other to assess their relative weight. After having seen the scenes, participants were required to judge the sensibility of sentences in which ownership of the object was ascribed to one of the two characters. Responses were faster when the objects were located in the reaching space of the characterto whom ownership was ascribed in the sentence and when ownership was ascribed to the character who finds the object first. When contrasting the relevant cues, results indicate that touch is stronger than temporal priority in modulating the ascription of object ownership. However, all these effects were also influenced by contextual social cues like the gender of both characters and participants, the presence of a third-party observer, and the co-presence of characters. Consistent with our hypothesis, our results provide evidence that many different cues of physical control influence the ascription of ownership in daily social contexts
Sustainable materials: a linking bridge between material perception, affordance, and aesthetics
Full text linkThe perception of material properties, which refers to the way in which individuals perceive and interpret materials through their sensory experiences, plays a crucial role in our interaction with the environment. Affordance, on the other hand, refers to the potential actions and uses that materials offer to users. In turn, the perception of the affordances is modulated by the aesthetic appreciation that individuals experience when interacting with the environment. Although material perception, affordances, and aesthetic appreciation are recognized as essential to fostering sustainability in society, only a few studies have investigated this subject matter systematically and their reciprocal influences. This scarcity is partially due to the challenges offered by the complexity of combining interdisciplinary topics that explore interactions between various disciplines, such as psychophysics, neurophysiology, affective science, aesthetics, and social and environmental sciences. Outlining the main findings across disciplines, this review highlights the pivotal role of material perception in shaping sustainable behaviors. It establishes connections between material perception, affordance, aesthetics, and sustainability, emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary research and integrated approaches in environmental psychology. This integration is essential as it can provide insight into how to foster sustainable and durable changes
Square bananas, blue horses: The relative weight of shape and color in concept recognition and representation
Full text linkThe present study investigates the role that shape and color play in the representation of animate (i.e. animals) and inanimate manipulable entities (i.e. fruits), and how the importance of these features is modulated by different tasks. Across three experiments participants were shown either images of entities (e.g., a sheep or a pineapple) or images of the same entities modified in color (e.g. a blue pineapple) or in shape (e.g. an elongated pineapple). In Experiment 1 we asked participants to categorize the entities as fruit or animal. Results showed that with animals color does not matter, while shape modifications determined a deterioration of the performance - stronger for fruit than for animals. To better understand the findings, in Experiment 2 participants were asked to judge if entities were graspable (manipulation evaluation task). Participants were faster with manipulable entities (fruit) than with animals; moreover alterations in shape affected the response latencies more for animals than for fruit. In Experiment 3 (motion evaluation task), we replicated the disadvantage for shape-altered animals, while with fruits shape and color modifications produced no effect. By contrasting shape- and color- alterations the present findings provide information on shape/color relative weight, suggesting that the action based property of shape is more crucial than color for fruit categorization, while with animals it is critical for both manipulation and motion tasks. This contextual dependency is further revealed by explicit judgments on similarity - between the altered entities and the prototypical ones - provided after the different tasks. These results extend current literature on affordances and biofunctionally embodied understanding, revealing the relative robustness of biofunctional activity compared to intellectual one
Indici visivi e giudizi impliciti di proprietà. Uno studio sperimentale
No full textPsychological evidence has shown that even small children rely on a number of physical cues of agent-object relationship to determine objects’ ownership. These studies however typically assume that object-ownership is an abstract concept that is inferred from salient visual stimuli leaving open how such concept is represented. In two experiments, we used the same context to determine whether different visual cues (spatial proximity and temporal priority) ground the sense of object-ownership as measured by a sensibility judg-ment task. Results show that subjects were faster when the objects were located in the peripersonal space of the character to whom ownership was a scribed by the sentence and when there was a match between the “first finder ” and the sentence subject. Overall our data provide initial evidence that a basic sense of ownership is partially grounded in perceptual experiences
Naming a Lego world. The role of language in the acquisition of abstract concepts
Full text linkWhile embodied approaches of cognition have proved to be successful in explaining concrete concepts and words, they have more difficulties in accounting for abstract concepts and words, and several proposals have been put forward. This work aims to test the Words As Tools proposal, according to which both abstract and concrete concepts are grounded in perception, action and emotional systems, but linguistic information is more important for abstract than for concrete concept representation, due to the different ways they are acquired: while for the acquisition of the latter linguistic information might play a role, for the acquisition of the former it is instead crucial. We investigated the acquisition of concrete and abstract concepts and words, and verified its impact on conceptual representation. In Experiment 1, participants explored and categorized novel concrete and abstract entities, and were taught a novel label for each category. Later they performed a categorical recognition task and an image-word matching task to verify a) whether and how the introduction of language changed the previously formed categories, b) whether language had a major weight for abstract than for concrete words representation, and c) whether this difference had consequences on bodily responses. The results confirm that, even though both concrete and abstract concepts are grounded, language facilitates the acquisition of the latter and plays a major role in their representation, resulting in faster responses with the mouth, typically associated with language production. Experiment 2 was a rating test aiming to verify whether the findings of Experiment 1 were simply due to heterogeneity, i.e. to the fact that the members of abstract categories were more heterogeneous than those of concrete categories. The results confirmed the effectiveness of our operationalization, showing that abstract concepts are more associated with the mouth and concrete ones with the hand, independently from heterogeneity
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