The benefits of sensorimotor knowledge: Body-object interaction facilitates semantic processing

This article examined the effects of body-object interaction (1301) on semantic processing. BOI measures perceptions of the ease with which a human body can physically interact with a word's referent. In Experiment 1, 1301 effects were examined in 2 semantic categorization tasks (SCT) in which participants decided if words are easily imageable. Responses were faster and more accurate for high 1301 words (e.g., mask) than for low 1301 words (e.g., ship). In Experiment 2, 1301 effects were examined in a semantic lexical decision task (SLDT), which taps both semantic feedback and semantic processing. The 1301 effect was larger in the SLDT than in the SCT, suggesting that 1301 facilitates both semantic feedback and semantic processing. The findings are consistent with the embodied cognition perspective (e.g., Barsalou's, 1999, Perceptual Symbols Theory), which proposes that sensorimotor interactions with the environment are incorporated in semantic knowledge.