Research Lines

Grounded Cognition

The Grounded Cognition Lab aims at advancing the understanding of the grounded, embedded, embodied, situated, extended, and dynamic nature of the human mind.

Central questions are:

-What are the roles played in human thought by its main contexts of interaction: body, language, co-actors and culture?

-How can we think of abstract concepts such as time, number, power, trustworthiness, or the good and the bad?

-How does communication arise in the multimodal interaction between interlocutors?

-How is thought scaffolded by material anchors provided by culture and education?

-How are communicative systems motivated and constrained by the grounded mind?

Representative Publications

De la Fuente, J., Santiago, J., Román, A., Dumitrache, C., & Casasanto, D. (2014). When you think about it, your past is in front of you: How culture shapes spatial conceptions of time. Psychological Science, 25, 1682-1690.

Ouellet, M., Santiago, J., Funes, M. J. & Lupiáñez, J. (2010). Thinking about the future moves attention to the right. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human, Perception and Performance, 36, 17-24.

Santiago, J., Ouellet, M., Román, A., & Valenzuela, J. (2012). Attentional factors in conceptual congruency. Cognitive Science, 36, 1051-1077.