How do we think about things we have never encountered before? Embodied theories of cognition hold that conceptual thought is composed of partial recordings of the neural activation that arises during perceptual and motor experiences So, thinking about an apple can involve re-enacting perceptual recordings of its bright green colour, the smoothness of its skin, the crunch of its crisp flesh, the fragrant rush of the juice, and the pleasing tart taste. One consequence of these modality-specific representations is that people experience processing costs when switching between modalities: if people have just mentally represented that an apple is green, they will be faster to process its shininess (another visual property) than its tartness (a property from a different modality). However, our thoughts are not limited to recycling familiar ideas; if we see a bright purple apple sitting in a fruit bowl, we can guess its flavour and texture without ever picking it up. This project proposes to examine whether the construction of new concepts is affected by switching costs even more profoundly than the retrieval of familiar concepts. A series of response time experiments will examine how modality-specific object properties affect the creation of new representations during conceptual combination.

Individual online experimentation.