Connell, Louise and Lynott, Dermot and Banks, Briony (2018) Interoception: the forgotten modality in perceptual grounding of abstract and concrete concepts. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 373 (1752). p. 20170143. ISSN 0962-8436

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Abstract

Conceptual representations are perceptually grounded, but when investigating which perceptual modalities are involved, researchers have typically restricted their consideration to vision, touch, hearing, taste and smell. However, there is another major modality of perceptual information that is distinct from these traditional five senses; that is, interoception, or sensations inside the body. In this paper, we use megastudy data (modality-specific ratings of perceptual strength for over 32 000 words) to explore howinteroceptive information contributes to the perceptual grounding of abstract and concrete concepts.We report howinteroceptive strength captures a distinct formof perceptual experience across the abstract–concrete spectrum, but is markedly more important to abstract concepts (e.g. hungry, serenity) than to concrete concepts (e.g. capacity, rainy). In particular, interoception dominates emotion concepts, especially negative emotions relating to fear and sadness, moreso than other concepts of equivalent abstractness and valence. Finally, we examine whether interoceptive strength represents valuable information in conceptual content by investigating its role in concreteness effects in word recognition, and find that it enhances semantic facilitation over and above the traditional five sensory modalities. Overall, these findings suggest that interoception has comparable status to other modalities in contributing to the perceptual grounding of abstract and concrete concepts. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain’.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	interoception; concepts; grounding; perceptual strength; perceptual simulation;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Science and Engineering > Psychology
Item ID:	15649
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0143
Depositing User:	Dermot Lynott
Date Deposited:	09 Mar 2022 12:16
Journal or Publication Title:	Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Publisher:	The Royal Society
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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