Causality is a shared general experience, but languages differ in the way they encode it. This research explores the possible correlation between society type, language and causal attribution in the way Spanish speakers think and judge causality. 202 native speakers of European and American Spanish participated in three different studies: (i) an adaptation of Singelis' (1994) psychological questionnaire for social in(ter)dependency; (ii) a non-verbal categorisation task for the attribution of causal responsibility; and (iii) a multimodal description task for causal events. Data were elicited with a set of 58 causal videoclips from the CAL project (NSF,BCS-1535846). Results show that all Spanish speakers, regardless of their Western (Spain) or Eastern (Latin America) backgrounds, categorise and linguistically describe causality based on the degree of the action's intentionality. A strong correlation between language and causal categorisation was found, supporting the idea that language is a determining factor in the causal attribution.

The CONTROL IS UP metaphor is an embodied cognitive mechanism that helps western speakers reason about power relations in terms of vertical spatial organization, This paper explores its multimodal elaboration in visual manifestations of pyramidal structured arrangements and kinetic practices such as genuflexion in medieval miniatures in order to (i) demonstrate the role of multimodal representations of metaphors in reasoning, (ii) unveil power relationships between different societal strata. 34 miniatures (12th ct. Liber feudorum maior) were analised with the “multimodal genuflexion test” to describe and measure (CAD-software) distances between kinetic elements (facial/manual gestures, postures). Results indicate that (i) power relations are not just vertically represented (kneeling & bowing), physical distance between characters and position of hands are crucial, (ii) there is a significant positive correlation [U = 61,119; p = 0.003] between the power figure and the degree of “body bending” (bowing, kneeling) and hand distance.