TY  - JOUR
A1  - Sixtus, Elena
A1  - Fischer, Martin H.
A1  - Lindemann, Oliver
T1  - Finger posing primes number comprehension
JF  - Cognitive processing : international quarterly of cognitive science
N2  - Canonical finger postures, as used in counting, activate number knowledge, but the exact mechanism for this priming effect is unclear. Here we dissociated effects of visual versus motor priming of number concepts. In Experiment 1, participants were exposed either to pictures of canonical finger postures (visual priming) or actively produced the same finger postures (motor priming) and then used foot responses to rapidly classify auditory numbers (targets) as smaller or larger than 5. Classification times revealed that manually adopted but not visually perceived postures primed magnitude classifications. Experiment 2 obtained motor priming of number processing through finger postures also with vocal responses. Priming only occurred through canonical and not through non-canonical finger postures. Together, these results provide clear evidence for motor priming of number knowledge. Relative contributions of vision and action for embodied numerical cognition and the importance of canonicity of postures are discussed.
KW  - Embodied cognition
KW  - Finger counting
KW  - Numerical cognition
KW  - Priming
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-017-0804-y
SN  - 1612-4782
SN  - 1612-4790
VL  - 18
SP  - 237
EP  - 248
PB  - Springer
CY  - Heidelberg
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Czerwon, Beate
A1  - Hohlfeld, Annette
A1  - Wiese, Heike
A1  - Werheid, Katja
T1  - Syntactic structural parallelisms influence processing of positive stimuli evidence from cross-modal ERP priming
JF  - International journal of psychophysiology
N2  - Language can strongly influence the emotional state of the recipient. In contrast to the broad body of experimental and neuroscientific research on semantic information and prosodic speech, the emotional impact of grammatical structure has rarely been investigated. One reason for this might be, that measuring effects of syntactic structure involves the use of complex stimuli, for which the emotional impact of grammar is difficult to isolate. In the present experiment we examined the emotional impact of structural parallelisms, that is, repetitions of syntactic features, on the emotion-sensitive "late positive potential" (LPP) with a cross-modal priming paradigm. Primes were auditory presented nonsense sentences which included grammatical-syntactic parallelisms. Visual targets were positive, neutral, and negative faces, to be classified as emotional or non-emotional by the participants. Electrophysiology revealed diminished LPP amplitudes for positive faces following parallel primes. Thus, our findings suggest that grammatical structure creates an emotional context that facilitates processing of positive emotional information.
KW  - Language
KW  - Emotion
KW  - Priming
KW  - ERP
KW  - Late positive potential
KW  - Structural parallelisms
Y1  - 2013
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2012.10.014
SN  - 0167-8760
SN  - 1872-7697
VL  - 87
IS  - 1
SP  - 28
EP  - 34
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -