Grounding Symbolic Operations in Modality-Specific Processing

Abstract : The research performed under this contract assessed whether fundamental symbolic operations-predication, conceptual combination, and the representation of abstract concepts-arise from the simulation of modality-specific states in the brain. Traditionally, symbolic operations have been widely assumed to arise from the manipulation of amodal symbols. Indeed, researchers often assume that symbolic operations could only result in this latter way. Recent research on grounded cognition, however, has proposed that symbolic operations, in principle, could arise from modality-specific simulation. The experiments performed here offer preliminary evidence that they do.