Abstract Theories of grounded cognition postulate that concepts are grounded in sensorimotor experience. But how can that be for concepts like Atlantis for which we do not have that experience? We claim that such concepts obtain their sensorimotor grounding indirectly, via already-known concepts used to describe them. Participants learned novel words referring to up or down concepts (mende = enhanced head or mende = bionic foot). In a first experiment, participants then judged the sensibility of sentences implying up or down actions (e.g., “You scratch your bionic foot”) by performing up or down hand movements. Reactions were faster when the hand movement matched the direction of the implied movement. In the second experiment, we observed the same congruency effect for sentences like, “You scratch your mende”, whose implied direction depended entirely on the learning phase. This offers a perspective on how concepts learned without direct experience can nonetheless be grounded in sensorimotor experience.

中文翻译：

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仅从语言中学习的新概念的即时感觉运动基础

摘要 扎根认知理论假定概念以感觉运动经验为基础。但是对于像亚特兰蒂斯这样我们没有经验的概念，这怎么可能呢？我们声称这些概念通过用于描述它们的已知概念间接获得了它们的感觉运动基础。参与者学习了涉及向上或向下概念的新词（mende = 增强的头部或 mende = 仿生脚）。在第一个实验中，参与者然后通过向上或向下的手部动作来判断暗示向上或向下动作的句子的敏感性（例如，“你挠了你的仿生脚”）。当手部运动与暗示运动的方向相匹配时，反应会更快。在第二个实验中，我们观察到了同样的一致性效应，比如“你抓挠你的门德”，其隐含方向完全取决于学习阶段。这提供了一个视角，即在没有直接经验的情况下学习的概念如何能够以感觉运动经验为基础。