An Embodied Cognitive Study On The Temperature Sensation

Sensation is the foundation of psychological phenomenon, the temperature sensation can influence one’s cognition. Traditional theory of cognitive psychology holds that cognitive activities can be produced through the processing of cold and hot information. But the theory of embodied cognition holds that our body is interacted with the mind, environment and human process cognitive activity through experiences, therefore the body plays an important role in cognitive activity of hot and cold sensation. The research is based on perceptual symbol system theory and conception metaphor theory to explore the relationships between hot and cold sensation and the hot and cold words.Experiment 1 tested whether the change of body cognitive state can lead to the change of cognitive activities by using the method of embodied cognition. We examined whether different temperature can affect the participants’memory of lexicons(The concept derived from the temperature-related words) of the temperature sensations through changing participants’cognition of temperature and using "study-test" pattern and signal detection theory. The result indicated that the participants’memory of lexicons of the temperature sensations can be influenced by different body cognitive state. When participants feel hot, the recognition of hot words is better than the recognition of cold words. When participants feel cold, the recognition of cold words is better than the recognition of hot words.Experiment 2 explored whether the effect of embodiment is bidirectional, we tested whether the change of cold and hot cognitive activities can result in the change of body cognitive state. Participants were asked to recall the "hot or cold" event, and then observed their perception of the environment. The result indicated that the perception of the environment can be influenced by different cognitive activities. When participants recall hot-related events, they overestimate the temperature, When participants recall cold-related events, participants underestimate the temperature.Experiment 3 explored whether there is implicit association between the concept of hot-cold and the words related temperature and provide implicit cognition evidence between hot-cold sensation and hot-cold cognition. We use Implicit Association Test to reveal the relationship between concept word and attribute word and verify whether there was an association between them. The result indicated that the implicit effects was existed between them. There is a strong implicit effects between hot and hot-words, cold and cold-words.