God in body and space: Investigating the sensorimotor grounding of abstract concepts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
concepts are defined as concepts that cannot be experienced directly through the sensorimotor modalities. Explaining our understanding of such concepts poses a challenge to neurocognitive models of knowledge. One account of how these concepts come to be represented is that sensorimotor representations of grounded experiences are reactivated in a way that is constitutive of the abstract concept. In the present experiment, we investigated how sensorimotor information might constitute GOD-related concepts, and whether a person's self-reported religiosity modulated this grounding. To do so, we manipulated both the state of the body (i.e., kneeling vs. sitting) and the state of stimuli (i.e., spatial position on the screen) in two tasks that required conceptual categorization of abstract words. Linear Mixed Effects model fitting procedures were used to determine which manipulated factors best predicted response latency and accuracy in both tasks. We successfully replicated previous research demonstrating faster categorization of GOD-related words when they were presented at the top of the screen. Importantly, results demonstrated that the kneeling posture manipulation enhanced this effect, as did religiosity, as participants who scored higher in religiosity showed a greater effect of the posture manipulation on the speed with which word categorization occurred when those words were presented in the higher visuospatial presentation condition. Overall, we interpreted our findings to suggest that directly manipulating sensorimotor information can facilitate the categorization of abstract concepts, supporting the notion that this information in part constitutes the representation of abstract concepts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".