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
Famous quotes containing the word reasoning:
“Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“If your little savage were left to himself and be allowed to retain all his ignorance, he would in time join the infant’s reasoning to the grown man’s passion, he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)