van Elk, M. & Blanke, O.
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Lausanne, Switzerland
Several studies indicate that body semantics, i.e. semantic knowledge about the human body, comprises a distinct conceptual category. The present study addressed the relation between body semantics and spatial body representations, by presenting participants with word pairs, one below the other, referring to body parts. In the first experiment it was found that subjects responded faster to word pairs that were in a congruent (e.g. EYE / MOUTH) compared to an incongruent (e.g. MOUTH / EYE) spatial position. In addition, a body distance effect was observed, reflected in a decrease in reaction times for word pairs referring to body parts that are further apart (e.g. MOUTH / FOOT) compared to body parts that are close in space (e.g. MOUTH / EYE). In two follow-up studies we found that these effects did not occur during a semantic categorization task and were not modulated by the visual field to which the words were presented. Thereby the present study shows that only when asked to judge the spatial congruency of words referring to body parts, subjects implicitly activate veridical information about the relative distance between body parts. We discuss these new data with respect to theories of embodied cognition and body semantics.