The Influence Of Tactile Experience On Cognitive Judgment

With the rising thought of Embodied Cognition movement, more and more researchers gradually realized that cognition is dependent on human body and its sensory-motor system, and also emphasized the critical role of the organism’s structure of body played in cognitive processing. As one of the initial senses of human body, touch is an important channel to obtain information and manipulate the environments. However, its impact on cognitive judgment has received little attention. In this study, by taking gender categorization and Chinese characters recognition as examples, behavioral experiments have been used to investigate the influences of touch on cognitive judgment. By taking undergraduate and postgraduate students as subjects, we designed two experimental studies. In experiment1, we required the subjects to squeeze the balls of different hardness (experiment la) or finish the questionnaire with different press (experiment1b), in order to produce different kinds of hardness in sense of touch; and then make the subjects categorize sex-ambiguous faces as male or female in order to investigate the impact of hardness of the sense of touch on gender categorization. The results showed that the subjects who squeezed the hard ball or filled in the questionnaire hard biased the categorization of sex-ambiguous faces toward "male"; yet the subjects who squeezed the soft ball or filled in the questionnaire gently biased the categorization of sex-ambiguous faces toward "female". In experiment2, we investigated the impact of hardness sense of touch on recognition of Chinese characters with the "hard" or "soft" meaning. Tactile experience was induced as the same as in experiment1a. The results showed that the subjects squeezed hard ball correctly recognized more target words with "hard" meaning; yet that the subjects squeezed soft ball correctly recognized more target words with "soft" meaning.Finally we can reach two important conclusions from this study:(1) tactile experience affects subjects categorize sex-ambiguous faces as male or female, that is, embodied effect exists in gender categorization;(2) tactile experience influences the recognition of Chinese characters with the "soft" or "hard" meaning. This means that embodied effect exists in cognitive judgment. The role of sensory-motor systems in other high-level cognitive processes could be explored in further studies.