Focusing on the expression of manner and path in the ‘frog story’ narrations of Estonian native speakers, this study shows that Estonian – a morphologically rich satellite-framed Finno-Ugric language – is characterised by high manner and high path salience. Furthermore, when analysing one of the core qualities of manner – speed – we show that when the participants were asked to narrate a story as if the events developed slowly, they also spoke slowly and their stories tended to be long (both in time duration and word count) and include many details. When they were asked to tell the story as if the events developed fast, they also spoke faster and used more verbs of caused motion and verbs of vertical motion. Thus, the speed of motion in the physical world seems to be mimicked by speech rate, indicating mental simulation and iconic prosody. The exact nature of speed effects in linguistic choices for expressing motion remains to be studied in future works.

Discourse comprehension relies on the construction of a mental model that represents the unfolding in time of the events described. In causal scenarios, where the action of one agent (the enabler) temporally precedes and enables the action of another agent (the causer), discourse may reflect the underlying event structure by describing the enabler’s action first and then the causer’s action (story order) or may describe the causer’s action first (backward order). Studies in the literature have shown that adults consider causers to be more responsible than enablers in moral scenarios. Based on the assumption that story order favors the construction of a mental model of events, we conducted an experiment to test the prediction that preference for the causer over the enabler should be greater when events are presented in story order than in backward order. The participants in the experiment were 42 fifth-grade children, 42 adolescents, and 42 adults. The results of the experiment confirmed the prediction for all three groups of participants. We discuss the practical implications of these results for learning contexts, legal contexts, and the psychology of moral judgments.

In recent years, scientists have increasingly taken to investigate the predictive nature of cognition. We argue that prediction relies on abstraction, and thus theories of predictive cognition need an explicit theory of abstract representation. We propose such a theory of the abstract representational capacities that allow humans to transcend the “here-and-now.” Consistent with the predictive cognition literature, we suggest that the representational substrates of the mind are built as a hierarchy, ranging from the concrete to the abstract; however, we argue that there are qualitative differences between elements along this hierarchy, generating meaningful, often unacknowledged, diversity. Echoing views from philosophy, we suggest that the representational hierarchy can be parsed into: modality-specific representations, instantiated on perceptual similarity; multimodal representations, instantiated primarily on the discovery of spatiotemporal contiguity; and categorical representations, instantiated primarily on social interaction. These elements serve as the building blocks of complex structures discussed in cognitive psychology (e.g., episodes, scripts) and are the inputs for mental representations that behave like functions, typically discussed in linguistics (i.e., predicators). We support our argument for representational diversity by explaining how the elements in our ontology are all required to account for humans’ predictive cognition (e.g., in subserving logic-based prediction; in optimizing the trade-off between accurate and detailed predictions) and by examining how the neuroscientific evidence coheres with our account. In doing so, we provide a testable model of the neural bases of conceptual cognition and highlight several important implications to research on self-projection, reinforcement learning, and predictive-processing models of psychopathology.

The aim of this study was to gain further insight into how analogical reasoning and mental simulation, two cognitive strategies, influence team dynamics in innovative product design. A particular emphasis was placed on exploring the association between these two strategies and team cohesion and team collaboration. Analogies were coded for “analogical distance” (i.e., within domain or between domain) and “analogical purpose” (i.e., problem identification, function finding, solution generation, and explanation). The results indicated that the presence of either analogizing or mental simulation was related to team cohesion and team collaboration, with mental simulation having an especially marked association with team collaboration. Within-domain analogizing was found to enhance team collaboration, but it did not influence team cohesion. Furthermore, all types of analogical purpose showed a similar association with team cohesion, whereas solution generation and function finding had a stronger association with team collaboration. We propose that analogizing and mental simulations are strategies that serve valuable functions in engendering enhanced cohesion and collaboration, which might be expected to lead to more effective design outcomes, although this remains an empirical question in need of further corroboration.

Embodied theories of cognition propose that humans use sensorimotor systems in processing language. The Action-Sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) refers to the finding that motor responses are facilitated after comprehending sentences that imply movement in the same direction. In sign languages there is a potential conflict between sensorimotor systems and linguistic semantics: movement away from the signer is perceived as motion toward the comprehender. We examined whether perceptual processing of sign movement or verb semantics modulate the ACE. Deaf ASL signers performed a semantic judgment task while viewing signed sentences expressing toward or away motion. We found a significant congruency effect relative to the verb’s semantics rather than to the perceived motion. This result indicates that (a) the motor system is involved in the comprehension of a visual–manual language, and (b) motor simulations for sign language are modulated by verb semantics rather than by the perceived visual motion of the hands.

The property generation task (i.e. “feature listing”) is often assumed to measure concepts. Typically, researchers assume implicitly that the underlying representation of a concept consists of amodal propositions, and that verbal responses during property generation reveal their conceptual content. The experiments reported here suggest instead that verbal responses during property generation reflect two alternative sources of information: the linguistic form system and the situated simulation system. In two experiments, properties bearing a linguistic relation to the word for a concept were produced earlier than properties not bearing a linguistic relation, suggesting the early properties tend to originate in a word association process. Conversely, properties produced later tended to describe objects and situations, suggesting that late properties tend to originate from describing situated simulations. A companion neuroimaging experiment reported elsewhere confirms that early properties originate in language areas, whereas later properties originate in situated simulation areas. Together, these results, along with other results in the literature, indicate that property generation is a relatively complex process, drawing on at least two systems somewhat asynchronously.

When they process sentences, language comprehenders activate perceptual and motor representations of described scenes. On the “immersed experiencer” account, comprehenders engage motor and perceptual systems to create experiences that someone participating in the described scene would have. We tested two predictions of this view. First, the distance of mentioned objects from the protagonist of a described scene should produce perceptual correlates in mental simulations. And second, mental simulation of perceptual features should be multimodal, like actual perception of such features. In Experiment 1, we found that language about objects at different distances modulated the size of visually simulated objects. In Experiment 2, we found a similar effect for volume in the auditory modality. These experiments lend support to the view that language-driven mental simulation encodes experiencer-specific spatial details. The fact that we obtained similar simulation effects for two different modalities—audition and vision—confirms the multimodal nature of mental simulations during language understanding.

Two studies tested whether introducing images to designers during the design process lead to more useful design solutions as evaluated by the end users’ willingness to use the final design. It was hypothesized based on theories in cognitive science and design that there were at least two paths from images to usefulness. One path concerns analogically transferring within-domain properties to the design solution. The other path concerns mentally simulating end-user characteristics and preferences and inclusion of the user in the resulting design. Study 1 supported that random images led to increased outcome usefulness, and supported both hypothesized paths, by using within-domain products and end-user images as input. Study 2 showed that the image categories competed for attention, and that the within-domain product stimuli attracted the most attention and was considered the most inspirational to the designers. The practical use of the technique may lead to only marginally original products perhaps limiting its applicability to incremental innovation.