Daniel Casasanto

TL;DR: Findings provide evidence that the metaphorical relationship between space and time observed in language also exists in their more basic representations of distance and duration, and suggest that their mental representations of things the authors can never see or touch may be built, in part, out of representations of physical experiences in perception and motor action.

TL;DR: Right- and left-handers implicitly associated positive valence more strongly with the side of space on which they could act more fluently with their dominant hands, providing evidence for the perceptuomotor basis of even the most abstract ideas.

TL;DR: For instance, the authors found that right-handers tended to associate rightward space with positive ideas and negative space with negative ideas, while left-hander showed the opposite pattern, associating rightward spaces with negative concepts and leftward with positive concepts.

TL;DR: The authors found evidence that right and left-handers, who perform actions in systematically different ways, use correspondingly different areas of the brain for imagining actions and representing the meanings of action verbs.

TL;DR: Functional magnetic resonance imaging is used to compare premotor activity correlated with action verb understanding in right- and left-handers to refine theories of embodied semantics, suggesting that implicit mental simulation during language processing is body specific.