2020 Volume 27 Issue 3 Pages 250-261
The view of embodied cognition suggests that semantic memory shares processing resources with sensorimotor systems. The aim of the present study is to reveal what kind of impact motor simulation will make on memories of objects, which are manipulated by hands, and to elucidate the mechanism in which motor simulations functions. In Experiment 1, images of manipulable and non-manipulable objects were presented, and participants were instructed to memorize them while adopting different postures depending on the conditions. The result has confirmed that restraining the hand movement produces a specific decrease in the recall rate of the manipulable objects, but not in that of the non-manipulable ones. In experiment 2, words representing the name of the objects were used as stimuli. We examined the effect of hand position difference between learning and recall and the influence of the visibility of the hands on the performance of the learning process. The result showed that the origin of the decreased recall rate of the manipulable objects is the constrained hand movement, not the difference of the hand position or the visibility of hands. These results provide a piece of positive evidence that motor simulation plays a role in the long term memory of an object.
