Technology and Cognition: Does the Device We Use Constrain the Way We Retrieve Word Meanings?

We examined the possible implication of two different technological tools, the touch screen and the keyboard, on cross-modal interaction in writing. To do this, we revisit experiments (e.g. [1]) that investigated the recovery of spatial iconicity in semantic judgment and applied them in writing to dictation. In the present experiment participants had to type or to handwrite on a touchscreen, in the upper part or in the lower part of the screen, words whose referents are typically associated with the top or the bottom part of space. In this way congruent (e.g. cloud at the top of the screen) or incongruent (e.g. cloud at the bottom of the screen) conditions were created. The hypothesis was that incongruent conditions give rise to a delay in starting to write more pronounced for touch screen session than for the keyboard one. Results are discussed in terms of embodied cognition theory.