Imagery, emotion, and bioinformational theory: From body to brain

The bioinformational theory of emotional imagery is a model of the hypothetical mental representations activated when people imagine emotionally engaging events, and was initially proposed to guide research and practice in the use of imaginal exposure as a treatment for fear and anxiety (Lang, 1979). In this 50 year overview, we discuss the development of bioinformational theory and its impact on the study of psychophysiology and psychopathology, most importantly assessing its viability and predictions in light of more recent brain-based studies of neural functional activation. Bioinformational theory proposes that narrative imagery, typically cued by language scripts, activates an associative memory network in the brain that includes stimulus (e.g., agents, contexts), semantic (e.g., facts and beliefs) and, most critically for emotion, response information (e.g., autonomic and somatic) that represents relevant real-world coping actions and reactions. Psychophysiological studies in healthy and clinical samples reliably find measurable response output during aversive and appetitive narrative imagery. Neuroimaging studies confirm that emotional imagery is associated with significant activation in motor regions of the brain, as well as in regions implicated in episodic and semantic memory retrieval, supporting the bioinformational view that narrative imagery prompts mental simulation of events that critically includes the actions and reactions engaged in emotional contexts.

Concepts require flexible grounding

Research on semantic memory has a problem. On the one hand, a robust body of evidence implicates sensorimotor regions in conceptual processing. On the other hand, a different body of evidence implicates a modality independent semantic system. The standard solution to this tension is to posit a hub-and-spoke system with modality independent hubs and modality specific spokes. In this paper, I argue in support of an alternative view of grounding which remains committed to neural reenactment but emphasizes the multimodal and multilevel nature of the semantic system. This view is built upon the recognition that abstraction is a design feature of concepts. Semantic memory employs hierarchically structured representations to capture different degrees of abstraction. Grounding does not work the way that many embodied approaches have assumed.

Exploring the Emotional Functions of Co-Speech Hand Gesture in Language and Communication

Research over the past four decades has built a convincing case that co-speech hand gestures play a powerful role in human cognition . However, this recent focus on the cognitive function of gesture has, to a large extent, overlooked its emotional role-a role that was once central to research on bodily expression. In the present review, we first give a brief summary of the wealth of research demonstrating the cognitive function of co-speech gestures in language acquisition, learning, and thinking. Building on this foundation, we revisit the emotional function of gesture across a wide range of communicative contexts, from clinical to artistic to educational, and spanning diverse fields, from cognitive neuroscience to linguistics to affective science. Bridging the cognitive and emotional functions of gesture highlights promising avenues of research that have varied practical and theoretical implications for human-machine interactions, therapeutic interventions, language evolution, embodied cognition, and more.

Cognition wars

In what kinds of physical systems can cognition be realized? There are currently competing answers among scientists and theorists of cognition. There are many plant scientists who maintain that cognition can be realized in plants. There are biological scientists who maintain that cognition is materially realized in bacteria. In this paper, I will present the basis for such claims and evaluate them and discuss the future for theories of the metaphysical basis of cognition in the cognitive sciences.

Think3d!: Improving mathematics learning through embodied spatial training

Spatial thinking skills positively relate to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) outcomes, but spatial training is largely absent in elementary school. Elementary school is a time when children develop foundational cognitive skills that will support STEM learning throughout their education. Spatial thinking should be considered a foundational cognitive skill. The present research examined the impact of an embodied spatial training program on elementary students’ spatial and mathematical thinking. Students in rural elementary schools completed spatial and math assessments prior to and after participating in an origami and pop-up paper engineering-based program, called Think3d!. Think3d! uses embodied tasks, such as folding and cutting paper, to train two-dimensional to three-dimensional spatial thinking. Analyses explored spatial thinking gains, mathematics gains – specifically for problem types expected to show gains from spatial training – and factors predicting mathematics gains. Results showed spatial thinking gains in two assessments. Using a math categorization to target problems more and less likely to be impacted by spatial training, we found that all students improved on real-world math problems and older students improved on visual and spatial math problems. Further, the results are suggestive of developmental time points for implementing embodied spatial training related to applying spatial thinking to math. Finally, the spatial thinking assessment that was most highly related to training activities also predicted math performance gains. Future research should explore developmental issues related to how embodied spatial training might support STEM learning and outcomes.

Bodily action penetrates affective perception

Fantoni & Gerbino (2014) showed that subtle postural shifts associated with reaching can have a strong hedonic impact and affect how actors experience facial expressions of emotion. Using a novel Motor Action Mood Induction Procedure (MAMIP), they found consistent congruency effects in participants who performed a facial emotion identification task after a sequence of visually-guided reaches: a face perceived as neutral in a baseline condition appeared slightly happy after comfortable actions and slightly angry after uncomfortable actions. However, skeptics about the penetrability of perception (Zeimbekis & Raftopoulos, 2015) would consider such evidence insufficient to demonstrate that observer's internal states induced by action comfort/discomfort affect perception in a top-down fashion. The action-modulated mood might have produced a back-end memory effect capable of affecting post-perceptual and decision processing, but not front-end perception. Here, we present evidence that performing a facial emotion detection (not identification) task after MAMIP exhibits systematic mood-congruent sensitivity changes, rather than response bias changes attributable to cognitive set shifts; i.e., we show that observer's internal states induced by bodily action can modulate affective perception. The detection threshold for happiness was lower after fifty comfortable than uncomfortable reaches; while the detection threshold for anger was lower after fifty uncomfortable than comfortable reaches. Action valence induced an overall sensitivity improvement in detecting subtle variations of congruent facial expressions (happiness after positive comfortable actions, anger after negative uncomfortable actions), in the absence of significant response bias shifts. Notably, both comfortable and uncomfortable reaches impact sensitivity in an approximately symmetric way relative to a baseline inaction condition. All of these constitute compelling evidence of a genuine top-down effect on perception: specifically, facial expressions of emotion are penetrable by action-induced mood. Affective priming by action valence is a candidate mechanism for the influence of observer's internal states on properties experienced as phenomenally objective and yet loaded with meaning.

Mood congruity and episodic memory in young children

Although mood congruity effects on episodic memory have been reported extensively in adults, they have not been reported for children younger than 10 years. The current research investigated mood congruity effects in story recall using an embodied approach to mood induction involving a facial manipulation task with 3- and 4-year-old children. Participants held a chopstick or a popsicle stick in their mouths in a way to either produce or inhibit a smile while they listened to a story featuring happy events for a happy character and sad events for a sad character. Children's mood ratings before and after mood induction indicated that mood became more positive in the smile condition, with no change in the no smile condition. Children in the smile condition, but not in the no smile condition, remembered more about the happy character than the sad character in the story. These results extend mood congruity effects to 3- and 4-year olds, suggesting that at this age representations of emotion interact with basic memory processes. Moreover, the efficacy of reenactment of sensorimotor components of emotion in modifying mood is consistent with embodied representation of emotion during early childhood.

Symbol interdependency in symbolic and embodied cognition

Whether computational algorithms such as latent semantic analysis (LSA) can both extract meaning from language and advance theories of human cognition has become a topic of debate in cognitive science, whereby accounts of symbolic cognition and embodied cognition are often contrasted. Albeit for different reasons, in both accounts the importance of statistical regularities in linguistic surface structure tends to be underestimated. The current article gives an overview of the symbolic and embodied cognition accounts and shows how meaning induction attributed to a specific statistical process or to activation of embodied representations should be attributed to language itself. Specifically, the performance of LSA can be attributed to the linguistic surface structure, more than special characteristics of the algorithm, and embodiment findings attributed to perceptual simulations can be explained by distributional linguistic information.