Moving marbles to boxes above or below each other might seem a meaningless and emotionally neutral task, but a study published in the April issue of Cognition (available online in January) found that the direction of the motor action can actually affect people’s retrieval of emotional memories.
In a first experiment, the researchers, Dr. Daniel Casasanto of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Dr. Katinka Dijkstra of Erasmus University in the Netherlands, asked participants to move marbles either upward or downward from one cardboard box to another while asking them to recount positive or negative memories.
They found that when the participants’ movement was congruent with the valence of the memory they were asked to recount (upward for positive memories and downward for negative memories), they responded faster than when the movement and valence of the memory were incongruent.
In the second experiment, participants were prompted to recount memories without indication of whether they had to be positive or negative when they moved the marbles. It was found that the participants recounted more positive memories while moving marbles upward than while moving marbles downward. More negative memories were recounted while they moved marbles downward than while they moved marbles upward.
This suggests that “positive and negative life experiences are implicitly associated with schematic representations of upward and downward motion, consistent with theories of metaphorical mental representation,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
Read the research paper here
In a first experiment, the researchers, Dr. Daniel Casasanto of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Dr. Katinka Dijkstra of Erasmus University in the Netherlands, asked participants to move marbles either upward or downward from one cardboard box to another while asking them to recount positive or negative memories.
They found that when the participants’ movement was congruent with the valence of the memory they were asked to recount (upward for positive memories and downward for negative memories), they responded faster than when the movement and valence of the memory were incongruent.
In the second experiment, participants were prompted to recount memories without indication of whether they had to be positive or negative when they moved the marbles. It was found that the participants recounted more positive memories while moving marbles upward than while moving marbles downward. More negative memories were recounted while they moved marbles downward than while they moved marbles upward.
This suggests that “positive and negative life experiences are implicitly associated with schematic representations of upward and downward motion, consistent with theories of metaphorical mental representation,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
Read the research paper here
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