Context-dependent motor-semantic interactions: evidence from dual-task paradigms in semantic fluency.

Abstract

Embodied cognition theories propose that conceptual knowledge is grounded in sensorimotor experience, but evidence for motor involvement in semantic memory retrieval for natural items remains inconsistent. Across two pre-registered experiments, we investigated whether motor dual-tasks and body posture manipulations affect semantic recall for natural manipulable concepts (fruits) versus non-manipulable concepts (colors) during semantic fluency (SF) tasks. In Experiment 1, 46 young adults performed SF while executing concurrent motor sequences with either upper limbs or lower limbs as control. In Experiment 2, 46 young adults completed the same task while adopting either restricted or unrestricted control postures. Contrary to predictions of interference, Experiment 1 revealed facilitation: participants retrieved fruits significantly faster during upper limbs motor tasks compared to control dual-task, with no effects for the color category. This facilitation affected retrieval speed rather than semantic network structure, suggesting that semantically congruent movement might prime semantic recall, consistent with theories proposing that unbound motor feature activation facilitates conceptual access. Experiment 2 showed no significant posture effects on SF measures for either category. These findings support a weak embodiment perspective where motor systems influence semantic retrieval processes rather than core representations themselves. The context-dependent nature of the effects highlights that embodied influences on semantic memory are more flexible and task-sensitive than previously assumed. Motor involvement in semantic processing appears to depend critically on the specific relationship between concurrent motor activity and the conceptual domain being accessed, challenging assumptions about robust, context-independent embodied effects.