AbstractsPsychology

People are equipped with an additional 'mental pair of hands' that has a strong impact on how they act, but not on the decisions that they make. This is the conclusion drawn by this thesis. Two experiments discover the limitations of the body specificity hypothesis (Casasanto, 2009) by revealing that the impact of handedness is only relevant in active placement tasks and not in perceptual judgment tasks. Hence, people seem to act the way they do only for reasons of comfort. Whereas people place superior objects in a way that guarantees optimal accessibility, they do not consider the placements themselves to constitute positive or negative attributes of the object. This is further manifest in an extended replication of the Shepard task (Shepard & Metzler, 1971), which tests the ability to rotate virtual objects mentally. This task revealed that people prefer to virtually move the objects that are placed on the preferred side of their body. This finding also fits the results from the first two experiments. Taking into account the findings from all three experiments, a modified account of embodiment suggests itself. For this reason a manipulation-specificity hypothesis is articulated, which at once points to the link between real and mental manipulation of objects and explains the economy with which people solve active placement as well as mental simulation tasks. Thus, mental acting indeed seems to be embodied, but judging does not.