The Agent is Right: When Motor Embodied Cognition is Space-Dependent

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.具身机制在处理带有第一人称视角的语句时的作用已被学界广泛认可。然而，第三人称视角下的具身语句处理是否同样具备运动行为层面的意义，目前仍未可知。本研究开发了一种全新的动作-语句兼容性效应（Action-sentence Compatibility Effect, ACE）范式，要求被试执行与语句所蕴含的动作方向兼容或不兼容的动作，所用语句分别采用第一人称视角（实验1：你将一份披萨赠予路易）与第三人称视角（实验2：莉娅将一份披萨赠予路易）。实验结果表明，将视角从第一人称转换为第三人称，足以阻断运动具身机制，消除ACE效应。尤为关键的是，在实验3中，通过添加一个虚拟“身体”，使被试在采取第三人称视角时能够明确自身在空间中的定位，ACE效应得以恢复，这证实了运动具身过程具有空间依赖性。第四项对照实验通过将运动反应与传递动词的动作方向分离，进一步佐证了上述结论：仅当与恰当的语句-反应映射相结合时，视角采择才会引发显著的ACE效应。