Motor imagery and music : the influence of music on mental rotation tasks in the light of the embodied cognition theory

• Autor(a) principal: Castellar, Fernando Dantas
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/40821
• topic: Teoria da cognição corporificada; Actividade motora; Percepção da música; Música - Aspectos psicológicos; Ciências cognitivas; Teses de mestrado - 2019; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Psicologia; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Médicas

The Embodied Cognition Theory (ECT) has become a hot topic in Cognitive Science, providing the investigation of cognitive phenomena with food for thought through a wide range of empirical findings. Two core claims from ECT were investigated in the present study: 1) the non-neural parts of an organism’s body play a constraining role in cognition; and 2) all concepts (strong embodiment) or some concepts (weak embodiment) are grounded in modality-specific areas of the brain. In line with 2), studies on mental imagery of bodily-related movements (henceforth: motor imagery) suggest that we use motor concepts grounded in modality-specific areas of the brain (the motor cortices) when we carry out motor simulations of our own body (Jeannerod, 2006), including in cognitive tasks such as MR of bodily-related pictures (Parsons et al., 1995). Also, studies in music perception have correlated the cortical activation of motor areas of the brain with rhythmic perception, varying in degree of activation according to the rhythmic complexity of a stimulus (Grahn & Brett, 2007). Finally, these assumptions predict the Mozart Effect, which consists of subjects’ temporary enhancement in performance at spatial-temporal reasoning tasks, including MR tasks (Rauscher, Shaw & Ky, 1993). Based on these assumptions, it was investigated whether subjects’ (N= 36) performance at a MR of bodily-related pictures would differ after exposure to musical pieces with different levels of rhythmic complexity and a control condition (silence). Results show that, although subjects’ performance was affected by the biomechanical constraints of their own bodies, suggesting that the body biomechanics play a constraining role in cognition, the Mozart Effect was not observed, suggesting that either 1) weak conceptual embodiment may not be true for motor imagery, and motor concepts are not grounded in modality-specific brain areas, 2) the musical samples used in the present study were not adequate to elicit sufficient cortical activation that would eventually result in performance enhancement, or 3) the Mozart Effect is due to reasons other than cortical activation of modality-specific brain areas, such as increase in arousal/mood levels or an artefact of subjects’ preference for a stimulus (Chabris, 1999). It is suggested that future research employs brain-mapping techniques, such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET Scan), Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), or Electroencephalogram (EEG) to strengthen one or more hypotheses that account for the failure in observing the Mozart Effect in this study by identifying which brain areas were involved during the listening task and/or the MR of bodily-related pictures.