Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

According to the body-specificity hypothesis (Casasanto, 2009) people who interact with the environment differently (e.g., right- and left-handers) associate positive concepts with the space around their dominant hand, and negative concepts with the space around their subordinate hand. Our exploratory study replicated and extended previous findings, establishing a relationship between handedness and mental representation of emotionally valenced abstract concepts. In a task required bimanual categorization of positive and negative nouns participants showed different RT-profiles depending on their handedness. Right-handers categorized positive words faster with their right hand than with the left and negative words faster with their left hand than with the right. Left-handers showed the opposite pattern, whereas ambidextrous showed no differences in the categorizing speed for positive and negative words. Most importantly, the study suggested that these associations were critically influenced by experienced motor fluency. After 12 minutes of hampered interaction with the environment right-handers changed their RT-profiles of associations between space and valence. The results suggest that at least some of our abstract representations are so sensitive to the experienced motor (dys)fluency that it can be manifested within 1 sec of word processing.