Séminaire ayant lieu dans le cadre du Doctorat en informatique cognitive, en collaboration avec le centre de recherche CRIA             

TITRE : Sensorimotor Structure in Lexical Meaning

Louise Connell

Jeudi le 22 octobre 2026 à 10h30

Local PK-5115 (Il est possible d'y assister en virtuel en vous inscrivant ici)                

RÉSUMÉ

The cognitive sciences view concepts as the heart of cognition, yet it remains a matter of debate how we mentally represent lexical meanings as diverse as cat, affection, and calculus. Grounded theories of representation hold that the same neural systems engaged during perception and action experience are also engaged when meaning is processed during conceptual tasks, thus providing a grounding mechanism for semantic memory. However, the contribution of sensorimotor information beyond the senses of vision and hearing (and to a lesser extent touch and smell) is not well understood, nor is the role of sensorimotor information in grounding abstract concepts. By incorporating a multidimensional variety of perceptual experience from a range of distinct modalities and action experience from a range of distinct bodily effectors, and doing so at the full scale of adult semantic memory (approximately 40k lexical concepts), we have tested grounded theories across a broad variety of cognitive tasks. From semantic similarity to visual word recognition to categorical structure, we find that the sensorimotor experience underlying meaning representations plays an essential role in both concrete and abstract domains. Overall, these findings suggest that sensorimotor information helps provide humans with a robust, flexible conceptual system, where the distinction between abstract and concrete words is not as clearcut as ontological assumptions might suggest.

BIOGRAPHIE

Louise CONNELL is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Maynooth University, part of the National University of Ireland. An interdisciplinary researcher in psychology and cognitive science, she specializes in the sensorimotor basis of concepts in semantic memory and the role of language in cognition. Using techniques from cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics and computational cognitive modelling, her work has pioneered methods to examine how language and sensorimotor experience underpin key cognitive functions like categorisation, memory encoding, and abstract thought

RÉFÉRENCES 

Banks, B., & Connell, L. (2022). Multidimensional sensorimotor grounding of concrete and abstract categories. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 378(1870), Article 20210366. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0366

Connell, L., & Lynott, D. (2014).  Principles of representation: Why you can't represent the same concept twice.  TopiCS in Cognitive Science, 6, 390-406. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12097

Connell, L., & Lynott, D. (2024). What can language models tell us about human cognition? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 33(3), 181-189. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214241242746

Lynott, D., Connell, L., Brysbaert, M., Brand, J., & Carney, J. (2020). The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms: Multidimensional measures of perceptual and action strength for 40,000 English words. Behavior Research Methods, 52, 1271-1291. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01316-z

Wingfield, C., & Connell, L. (2023). Sensorimotor distance: A fully grounded measure of semantic similarity for 800 million concept pairs. Behavior Research Methods, 55, 3416–3432. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-022-01965-7