Reasoning
A series of experiments by Moreau and colleagues demonstrated the interrelation between motor experience and high-level reasoning. For example, although most individuals recruit visual processes when presented with spatial problems such as mental rotation tasks (Hyun and Luck, 2007), motor experts favor motor processes to perform the same tasks, with higher overall performance (Moreau, 2012). A related study showed that motor experts use similar processes for the mental rotation of body parts and polygons, whereas non-experts treated these stimuli differently (Moreau, 2013a). These results were not due to underlying confounds, as demonstrated by a training study which showed mental rotation improvements after a one-year motor training, compared with controls (Moreau et al., 2012). Similar patterns were also found in working memory tasks, with the ability to remember movements being greatly disrupted by a secondary verbal task in controls and by a motor task in motor experts, suggesting the involvement of different processes to store movements depending on motor experience, namely verbal for controls and motor for experts (Moreau, 2013b).
Read more about this topic: Motor Cognition
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