Does the Activation of Motor Information Affect Semantic Processing?

Knowledge of object use is one of the most important available types of knowledge for a living being. For instance, humans can make use of a hammer to nail wooden planks and build a house, chimpanzees can use a twig to “fish” for insects, and birds of prey called bearded vultures, or lammergeiers, can make use of stones to break bones and feed themselves with marrow. A basic issue in human cognition is how information concerning actions with objects is represented. Are motor representations critical components of object concepts? This question taps into the ongoing debate on the format (i.e., neural substrate, patterns of activation) of conceptual representations (for an overview see Scerrati 2017; Scerrati et al. 2017). Such debate critically involves two out of the three main research questions outlined in the present volume, that is, howconcepts become acquired and how they are being used in cognitive tasks. The current research is a psychological investigation, which attempts to address these questions and, specifically, how concept learning and representation interact with the development of motor abilities.