Ambiguity and Representational Stability: What is the role of embodied experiences?

Embodied cognition is sometimes presented as an alternative to computational approaches, the argument being that cognition is strongly influenced by an agent's body movement. However, the exact nature of this influence is still uncertain. In the current paper, we add to the conversation by analyzing adults' predictions in a high-ambiguity task: Adults had to decide which of two objects would sink faster (or slower) in water. Ambiguity was achieved by pitting object volume and object mass against buoyancy: The winning object of a pair was sometimes the bigger and heavier one, and sometimes it was the smaller and lighter one. The crucial manipulation was whether the stimuli were real-life objects or 2D pictures. All participants were presented with pictures of the objects during a training phase (when they received feedback on their predictions). Real-life objects were either present during the phase prior to the training (jars-first condition), or during the phase after the training (jars-last condition). Findings showed a clear influence of hands-on experiences: When allowed to hold the objects, adults were more likely to demonstrate a simplistic focus on object heaviness. These results call for a more nuanced understanding of the effect of embodied experiences on the stability of representations. While embodiment sometimes can help distinguish relevant from irrelevant information, we show that it can also destabilize representations acquired through visual information.