Embodied number processing

concepts become meaningful only when they refer to bodily experiences (e.g., Barsalou, 1999; Fischer & Zwaan, 2008; Glenberg, 1997; Pulvermüller, 2005; Rueschemeyer, Lindemann, van Elk, & Bekkering, 2009). Over the last two decades, research on language comprehension has provided a large amount of evidence for the idea that conceptual knowledge is grounded through such sensory-motor referencing. For instance, reading action-related sentences that imply a particular rotational motion (e.g., she opens the bottle) facilitates the execution of similar actions (e.g., rotating a knob counter-clockwise; Zwaan & Taylor, 2006; see also Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002). This functional link between the motor system and language comprehension has also been found at the neural level, reflected by motor-cortical activation through action-related language processing (e.g., Hauk, Johnsrude, & Pulvermüller, 2004). In turn, there is also evidence for the reverse referencing (in the sense of a functional link) from motor actions onto more efficient processing of action-congruent linguistic descriptions (Rueschemeyer, Lindemann, van Rooij, van Dam, & Bekkering, 2010) and memory retrieval (Pecher, Van Dantzig, Zwaan, & Zeelenberg, 2009; van Dam, Rueschemeyer, Bekkering, & Lindemann, 2013). EMBODIED NUMERICAL COGNITION With this increasing empirical evidence that activation of bodily representations contributes to conceptual knowledge, researchers began to consider the sensory-motor grounding of semantic processing also in the domain of mathematical cognition (e.g., Andres, Olivier, & Badets, 2008; Fischer, 2012; Lakoff & Núñez, 2000; Lindemann, Rueschemeyer, & Bekkering, 2009; Moeller et al., 2012). The present Special Issue presents the latest developments of this approach. The role of sensory and motor codes in number representation and mental arithmetic is important to understand because the two codes share the same class of information, namely knowledge about quantities and magnitudes. Consistent with this fact, similar parietal brain areas support magnitude processing for numbers and for grasping movements (Simon, Mangin, Cohen, Le Bihan, & Dehaene, 2002). Behavioural priming therefore works across the two domains. For example, large numbers facilitate hand opening responses (Andres, Davare, Pesenti, Olivier, & Seron, 2004) and the grasping of objects with a power grip (Lindemann, Abolafia, Girardi, & Bekkering, 2007) whereas small numbers prime hand closure and precision grip actions. In turn, number processing interferes with the timing of the duration of manual button responses (Kiesel & Vierck, 2008) and with the use of a particular response force (Krause, Lindemann, Toni, & Bekkering, 2014). Number processing also impacts judgements about © 2015 Taylor & Francis Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 2015 Vol. 27, No. 4, 381–387, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2015.1032295