Hand motor information affects conceptual representation without altering its structure: a food concept study

Conceptual representations integrate sensory and motor information. Hand motor processes, including those associated with gestures, are routinely recruited during concept retrieval, yet whether such recruitment shapes the structure of conceptual representations remains unclear. We addressed this question across three experiments using food-related words that were rated and classified as taste-dominant (“taste words”), hand-motor-dominant (“hand words”), or balanced across the two modalities (“intermediate words”). Separate groups completed a difficulty-rating task (Experiment 1), a semantic-judgment task (Experiment 2), or a lexical-decision task (Experiment 3), with participants in each experiment performing the corresponding task under both hand motor and taste interference conditions. Interference effects on taste words varied across tasks. By contrast, hand motor interference consistently disrupted the processing of both hand and intermediate words more strongly than taste interference did. These findings are discussed in relation to embodied cognition and the Gesture as Simulated Action framework.