Scientists observed how the brain responds to words representing hand-manipulable objects, when a participant's hands were either free to move or restrained. They showed that brain activity in response to hand-manipulable words was significantly reduced by hand restraints. Verbal responses were also affected by hand constraints. Their results support the idea of embodied cognition, which proposes that the meaning of words is represented through interactions between the body and the environment. Understanding how words are processed through embodied cognition could also be useful for artificial intelligence to learn the meaning of objects.
