How Handedness Shapes Language and Thought: First tests of the body-specificity hypothesis

old_uid7014
titleHow Handedness Shapes Language and Thought: First tests of the body-specificity hypothesis
start_date2009/05/25
schedule10h30-11h30
onlineno
detailssuite à 14h30
summaryDo people with different kinds of bodies think differently? According to the body-specificity hypothesis (Casasanto, 2009), people who interact with their physical environments in systematically different ways should form correspondin-gly different mental representations. In this talk, I will re-view studies showing that right -and left-handers, who per-form actions differently, use correspondingly different areas of the brain for imagining actions and representing action verb meanings. Further studies show that beyond influen-cing how people understand the concrete domain of action, the way we use our hands also shapes the way we repre-sent ideas with positive and negative emotional valence like honesty, intelligence, and goodness. Even our most abs-tract ideas depend, in part, on the particulars of our bodies.
responsiblesBressé, Cohen, Kergoat