title: The agent is right: when motor embodied cognition is space-dependent.
abstract: The role of embodied mechanisms in processing sentences endowed with a first person perspective is now widely accepted. However, whether embodied sentence processing within a third person perspective would also have motor behavioral significance remains unknown. Here, we developed a novel version of the Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) in which participants were asked to perform a movement compatible or not with the direction embedded in a sentence having a first person (Experiment 1: You gave a pizza to Louis) or third person perspective (Experiment 2: Lea gave a pizza to Louis). Results indicate that shifting perspective from first to third person was sufficient to prevent motor embodied mechanisms, abolishing the ACE. Critically, ACE was restored in Experiment 3 by adding a virtual "body" that allowed participants to know "where" to put themselves in space when taking the third person perspective, thus demonstrating that motor embodied processes are space-dependent. A fourth, control experiment, by dissociating motor response from the transfer verb's direction, supported the conclusion that perspective-taking may induce significant ACE only when coupled with the adequate sentence-response mapping.
authors.affiliation: CNRS FRE 3406, Institut des Sciences Cognitives, L2C2 Bron, France. claudia.gianelli3@unibo.it
authors.forename: Claudia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Gianelli
authors.forename: Alessandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Farnè
authors.forename: Romeo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Salemme
authors.forename: Marc
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Jeannerod
authors.forename: Alice C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Roy
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D005602:France; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008954:Models, Biological; D009048:Motor Skills; D009068:Movement; D011930:Reaction Time; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013028:Space Perception; D013060:Speech; D055815:Young Adult