Colour and Stability in Embodied Representations

Traditional views of cognition have assumed that thought involves the representation and manipulation of discrete, amodal symbols, while embodied theories of cognition hold that thought is grounded in the same neural systems that govern sensation, perception and action. This paper examines whether implicit perceptual information on object colour is represented during sentence comprehension even though doing so does not necessarily facilitate task performance. After reading a sentence that implied a particular colour for a given object, participants were presented with a picture of that object that either matched or mismatched the implied colour. When asked if the pictured object was mentioned in the preceding sentence, results showed that people’s responses were faster (but less accurate) when the colours mismatched than when they matched. A distinction between stable and unstable embodied representations is proposed to allow embodied theories to account for these findings, and discussed with reference to future directions in cognitive