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People are more likely to gesture when their speech is disfluent. Why? According to an influential proposal, speakers gesture when they are disfluent because gesturing helps them to produce speech. Here, we test an alternative proposal: People may gesture when their speech is disfluent because gestures serve as a pragmatic signal, telling the listener that the speaker is having problems with speaking. To distinguish between these proposals, we tested the relationship between gestures and speech disfluencies when listeners could see speakers' gestures and when they were prevented from seeing their gestures. If gesturing helps speakers to produce words, then the relationship between gesture and disfluency should persist regardless of whether gestures can be seen. Alternatively, if gestures during disfluent speech are pragmatically motivated, then the tendency to gesture more when speech is disfluent should disappear when the speaker's gestures are invisible to the listener. Results showed that speakers were more likely to gesture when their speech was disfluent, but only when the listener could see their gestures and not when the listener was prevented from seeing them, supporting a pragmatic account of the relationship between gestures and disfluencies. People tend to gesture more when speaking is difficult, not because gesturing facilitates speech production, but rather because gestures comment on the speaker's difficulty presenting an utterance to the listener., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Can performing simple motor actions help people learn the meanings of words? Here we show that placing vocabulary flashcards in particular locations after studying them helps students learn the definitions of novel words with positive or negative emotional valence. After studying each card, participants placed it on one of two shelves (top or bottom), according to its valence. Participants who were instructed to place positive cards on the top shelf and negative cards on the bottom shelf, consistent with metaphors that link "good" with "up," remembered the words' definitions better than participants who followed the opposite spatial mapping, and better than control participants who placed all of the cards on the desktop. Saying "up" and "down" after studying the cards was ineffective, suggesting a privileged role for motor action in activating space-valence associations that partly constitute the meanings of emotionally charged words. These results provide a first demonstration that mental metaphors can be activated strategically to improve (or impair) word learning: We call this the strategic use of mental metaphor (SUMM) effect. Even when multiple factors known to enhance encoding of verbal materials into long-term memory were matched across conditions (e.g., study time, repetition, distinctiveness, depth of processing), metaphor-congruent motor actions led to better elaborated, more durable memories., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Across many cultures people conceptualize time as extending along a horizontal Mental Time Line (MTL). This spatial mapping of time has been shown to depend on experience with written text, and may also depend on other graphic conventions such as graphs and calendars. All of this information is typically acquired visually, suggesting that visual experience may play an important role in the development of the MTL. Do blind people develop a MTL? If so, how does it compare with the MTL in sighted? In this study we tested early blind, late blind and sighted participants in a space-time congruity task. Participants had to classify temporal words by pressing a right and a left key, either with crossed or uncrossed hands. We found that the MTL develops in the absence of vision, and that it is based on the same external frame of reference in sighted and blind people. Reading braille may provide the same experiential link between space and time in the manual modality as reading printed text provides in the visual modality. These results showing a similar MTL in sighted and blind participants contrast with previous results showing that the Mental Number Line (MNL) depends on different spatial coordinates in the sighted and the blind, and suggest that spatial representations of time and number may have different experiential bases., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Research on the relationship between the representation of space and time has produced two contrasting proposals. ATOM posits that space and time are represented via a common magnitude system, suggesting a symmetrical relationship between space and time. According to metaphor theory, however, representations of time depend on representations of space asymmetrically. Previous findings in humans have supported metaphor theory. Here, we investigate the relationship between time and space in a nonverbal species, by testing whether non-human primates show space-time interactions consistent with metaphor theory or with ATOM. We tested two rhesus monkeys and 16 adult humans in a nonverbal task that assessed the influence of an irrelevant dimension (time or space) on a relevant dimension (space or time). In humans, spatial extent had a large effect on time judgments whereas time had a small effect on spatial judgments. In monkeys, both spatial and temporal manipulations showed large bi-directional effects on judgments. In contrast to humans, spatial manipulations in monkeys did not produce a larger effect on temporal judgments than the reverse. Thus, consistent with previous findings, human adults showed asymmetrical space-time interactions that were predicted by metaphor theory. In contrast, monkeys showed patterns that were more consistent with ATOM., (Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Can simple motor actions affect how efficiently people retrieve emotional memories, and influence what they choose to remember? In Experiment 1, participants were prompted to retell autobiographical memories with either positive or negative valence, while moving marbles either upward or downward. They retrieved memories faster when the direction of movement was congruent with the valence of the memory (upward for positive, downward for negative memories). Given neutral-valence prompts in Experiment 2, participants retrieved more positive memories when instructed to move marbles up, and more negative memories when instructed to move them down, demonstrating a causal link from motion to emotion. Results suggest that positive and negative life experiences are implicitly associated with schematic representations of upward and downward motion, consistent with theories of metaphorical mental representation. Beyond influencing the efficiency of memory retrieval, the direction of irrelevant, repetitive motor actions can also partly determine the emotional content of the memories people retrieve: moving marbles upward (an ostensibly meaningless action) can cause people to think more positive thoughts., (Copyright 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

How do we construct abstract ideas like justice, mathematics, or time-travel? In this paper we investigate whether mental representations that result from physical experience underlie people's more abstract mental representations, using the domains of space and time as a testbed. People often talk about time using spatial language (e.g., a long vacation, a short concert). Do people also think about time using spatial representations, even when they are not using language? Results of six psychophysical experiments revealed that people are unable to ignore irrelevant spatial information when making judgments about duration, but not the converse. This pattern, which is predicted by the asymmetry between space and time in linguistic metaphors, was demonstrated here in tasks that do not involve any linguistic stimuli or responses. These findings provide evidence that the metaphorical relationship between space and time observed in language also exists in our more basic representations of distance and duration. Results suggest that our mental representations of things we can never see or touch may be built, in part, out of representations of physical experiences in perception and motor action.