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Embodied Cognition

Article  in  Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · May 2013

DOI: 10.1002/wcs.1226

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Focus Article

Embodied cognitionLucia Foglia1∗ and Robert A. Wilson2

Traditional views in philosophy of mind and cognitive science depict the mind as aninformation processor, one whose connections with the body and the world are oflittle theoretical importance. On the contrary, mounting empirical evidence showsthat bodily states and modality-specific systems for perception and action underlieinformation processing, and that embodiment contributes to various aspects andeffects of mental phenomena. This article will briefly review and discuss some ofthis evidence and what it implies. By challenging mainstream accounts of mind andcognition, embodiment views offer new ways of conceptualizing knowledge andsuggest novel perspectives on cognitive variation and mind-body reductionism. 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

How to cite this article:WIREs Cogn Sci 2013. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1226

INTRODUCTION

In the western philosophical• tradition, the factAQ1that we have bodies has been mostly regarded

as irrelevant or peripheral to the understanding ofknowledge and cognition. Cartesian dualism, theview that minds is constituted by a fundamentallydifferent kind of substance than are bodies, evolvedinto an epistemological tradition that has informedvarious strands of cognitive science. One of thesestrands that has been particularly influential in thecognitive sciences is computationalism, the claim thatcognition is, in essence, the manipulation of abstractinformation via formal rules.1–3 On this view, anorganism’s body and its connection to the mind areof little theoretical importance; sensorimotor systems,although reasonable objects of inquiry in their ownright, are of interest in understanding cognition onlyinsofar as they provide sensory input and allow forbehavioral output. Ideally, even organisms without abody, such as brains in a vat or sophisticated computerprograms, could in principle exhibit extraordinary andsophisticated cognitive skills.

Proponents of the view known as ‘embodied

AQ2

cognition’, by contrast, emphasize the role of sensoryand motor functions in cognition itself. By viewingthe mind as grounded in the details of its sensory-motor embodiment, they model cognitive skills as

∗Correspondence to: lucia.foglia@mail.mcgill.ca1Department of Philosophy, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec,Canada2Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada

the product of a dynamic interplay between neuraland non-neural processes. On this view, there is nofracture between cognition, the agent’s body, andreal-life contexts. Consequently, the body intrinsicallyconstrains, regulates, and shapes the nature of mentalactivity. Call this view the embodiment thesis aboutcognition.

Such constraint, regulation, and shaping neednot involve the dependence of cognition on actualstates of the body. Indeed, much current research onembodiment emphasizes less the body’s direct rolein cognition than its implied role in reenactments ofexperience in the brain’s modality-specific systemsfor perception and action.4–16 The activation ofsensorimotor functions even in the absence ofdirect engagement with sensory input and behavioraloutput (for example, in imagery, planning, andremembering) suggests that, even when decoupledfrom the environment, knowledge representation andprocessing continue to be supported by patterns ofembodied responses. As we will explain further below,even this articulation of the embodiment thesis marksa departure from traditional cognitive science.

More radical such departures have beenmade within the embodied cognition movementby those appealing to dynamic systems theory toadvocate explicitly anti-representationalist views ofcognition.17–20 The central idea here is that the bodyhas a fundamental feedback-driven role in mentalfunctioning, and as long as a situated agent can sensethe world and be directly influenced by it, complexbehaviors and adaptive success do not require any

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reference to computation and representation at all.21

Here we do not explore the implications of thismore radical version of the embodiment thesis andits potential problems,22 but simply acknowledgethe diversity of work that falls under the heading‘embodied cognition’.

There is a continuing exploration of theembodiment thesis within the cognitive sciences. Herewe provide an overview of some of the core empiricalevidence that has been used to argue that the bodyis integral to the nature of cognitive processing itselfand that mental activity, instead of being centralizedand sharply distinct from low-level sensorimotorfunctions, is body-based, sometimes in quite surprisingways. We begin by elaborating on the general contrastwe have sketched between traditional and embodiedcognitive science.

EMBODIMENT VERSUS TRADITIONALCOGNITIVE SCIENCEDespite the prevalence of robustly physicalist ormaterialist views within the philosophy of mind andcognitive science, at the heart of mainstream accountslies a particular conception of cognition and mentalrepresentation. Central cognitive processing has beentypically conceptualized in abstraction from bodilymechanisms of sensory processing and motor control.The traditional formulation holds that what makessomething a mental process or event does not dependin any deep way on its physical realizer or internalconstitution, and mental capacities and intelligentbehavior do not arise from any specific bodily formor features.23–25 Two implications of this formulationabout cognition highlight its significance.

The first is the commitment to what SusanHurley26 dubbed the ‘sandwich model’, the viewthat the systems responsible for thinking areneatly segregated from, and ‘sandwiched’ between,the systems responsible for sensing and acting.The second, of more direct relevance to thosefocused on computational intelligence, linguistics,and neuroscience, is the commitment to a kind ofisolationism about the understanding of cognition:the claim that an explanation of cognitive processingshould be divorced from an appreciation of thephysical realization of that processing. A mindportrayed as disembodied is a special realm,populated by symbolic structures (representations)with quasi-linguistic and combinatorial properties.These symbols have been taken to be amodal, abstract,and arbitrary1,3,24,27,28: amodal because they areindependent of the brain’s systems for perceptionand action; abstract because they result from the

redescription of sensorimotor experience into a listof properties represented in propositional way; andarbitrary because the way in which they are linked totheir referents in the world bears no relationship tothe physical and functional features of the referents.On this view, not only is there a clear-cut distinctionbetween the mental representations processed by, say,language, imagery, and memory, and those processedby the sensorimotor system, but also the meaning ofsuch ‘central’ representations is completely divorcedfrom embodied experience.

Traditional views, hence, are committed to atleast three fundamental principles that proponents ofthe embodiment thesis reject:

• Information conveyed by a mental representationhas no modality-specific features. In thissense, representations are autonomous from thesensorimotor system, and its operational details.

• Knowledge is represented propositionally, andmeaning emerges from the relations among theconstituent symbols.

• Internal representations instruct the motor sys-tem, which is essentially separate and indepen-dent of cognition, and so cognitive processing isnot significantly limited, constrained, or shapedby bodily actions.

The embodiment thesis challenges these princi-ples. Stressing the centrality of the body for cognitionhas at least three implications: (1) significant differ-ences in embodiment often translate into differencesin cognitive processing, (2) algorithms that consti-tute cognition sometimes reflect the peculiarities ofthe physical body, and (3) failure to include informa-tion about the body in the description of the mindleads to accounts that are fundamentally misleadingand misguided. What advocates of the embodimentthesis aim to show is that systems for sensing, act-ing, and thinking are constitutively interdependent,and modality-specific representations are what ourcognition is made of.

WHAT THE EMBODIMENT THESIS ISThe embodiment thesis is motivated by the followingkinds of observations about behavior.

1. We typically gesture when we speak andgesturing does not just affect both interpersonalcommunication and language processing, butcan feed back and change the gesturer’s thinking.Gesturing while describing an action performed

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on an object, for example, a light disk, bringsaction-related information into the speaker’smental representations, and components of theaction reflected in the gesture alter the waythe speaker reasons about and acts toward thatobject.29

2. Gesturing and finger counting help representmathematical concepts and their contribution toa fast understanding of number concepts duringarithmetical learning and calculation indicatesthat an active and direct involvement of the bodyin the execution of a cognitive task simplifies itscomputational workload.30,31

3. Visual perception is a skillful activity, and bodilymovement and the feedback it generates aremore tightly integrated into visual processingthan traditional models of vision acknowledge.What we perceive is determined by what wedo in order to perceive. For example, to be amobile perceiver is to understand that much ofthe environment can be revealed and exploredthrough appropriate movements of the head andlimbs, or that to attain novel information onehas to turn around in response to an unexpectednoise.32–35

4. There are neurons, known as mirror neurons,that activate not only when we observe or under-stand an action performed by others, but alsowhen we carry out the same action with ourbody.36 The achievement of a motor equivalencesuggests that the understanding of other minds isbased on our capacity to act and would accountfor some complex aspects of our social life, suchus the capacity to ‘mentalize’ about others. Theunderstanding we have of one another wouldthus presuppose one’s own motor system, andbodily states would provide the building blocksof empathy, social coordination, imitation, andlanguage acquisition.36–40 By way of perform-ing a movement, therefore, we would not simplyaccomplish an action but accumulate the motorexperience necessary to represent the minds ofothers.

5. We often perform cognitive tasks, such asremembering, problem solving or imagining,more effectively by using our bodies to off-load information and simplify the nature of thecognitive processing. Holding specific body pos-tures or facial expressions, for example, causallyor constitutively facilitate both access to andretention of memories.5,41–45

Four implications specify the ways in whichcognition is underpinned both by particular bodily

states and modality-specific systems for perceptionand action. First, even when disconnected from theenvironment and its sensory information, cognitionis body-scaled, that is, grounded in those systemsthat evolved to allow the interactions with theworld—namely, the sensory and motor systems.Second, there are at least two grades of bodilyinvolvement in cognition: one that requires thebody directly (online embodiment), and the otherthat requires it indirectly, by way of neuralsimulations, (offline embodiment). Third, actualembodied responses can be stored and later used inoffline processing. In this sense, non-neural parts ofthe body constitute the building blocks of conceptualknowledge. And fourth only a creature with certainbodily features and skills can possess certain kinds ofcognitive capacities.

A useful way to articulate the embodiment thesisfurther is to ask what role or functions the body playsin cognition. At the most general level, there areat least two distinct but related roles, each with itsown implications for how we think of, and study,cognition. The first stresses the idea that the body canfunction as a cognitive constraint: in this sense, talkingor thinking about objects, either concrete or abstract,implies the appeal, deployment, or reactivation ofspecific patterns of bodily activity. The second rolehighlights the different ways in which the bodyacts as a distributor for cognitive processing, thusfunctioning as a partial realizer of cognition. Thegeneral idea of considering non-neural realizers forcognitive processing opens the door to more radicaltheories with some philosophical currency, such asthe extended mind thesis, which holds that the minditself extends beyond the boundaries of the individualorganism.15,16,46 We discuss each of these roles inmore detail in the remainder of this paper.

Body as a Constraint on CognitionAs a constraint on cognition, the body shapesthe nature of cognitive activity and the contentof the representations processed. Consider colorperception, sound localization, categorization, andspatial metaphor. Concepts and experiences of colors,for example, reflect the properties of the retinalcells and the features of the visual apparatus; sounddetection owes its peculiarity to the distance betweenthe ears; and spatial metaphors, whose locus is notlanguage but the way we conceptualize the body,heavily draw on embodied experiences.47–50

An illustration of this idea comes from thejoint work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.Beginning in their Metaphors We Live By,50 Lakoffand Johnson argued that many central cognitive

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processes, such as those concerning space and time,are both expressed and influenced by metaphors, andthat many metaphors reflect bodily features. Considera well-known metaphor that they discuss: that of loveas a kind of journey. Here the source domain (journey)is informed by our bodily physicality, and informationabout the body (such as its capacity for locomotion)shapes the way in which love is understood andconceptualized. Metaphors, hence, are not merelyuseful for embellishing communication, but reflectthe embodied experience that we have as creaturesthat move through the world in particular ways.

Spatial concepts provide perhaps a clearerexample: long and flat creatures would not be capable,as we are, of conceiving the world in terms on ‘front’,‘back’, ‘up’, and down’. These concepts arise and arearticulated thanks both to the particular body wehave and the specific ways it navigates in and throughspace. Although in these examples the physicalityof the body does not directly contribute to mentalprocessing, the construction of metaphors showsnonetheless that (1) abstract domains are groundedin more concrete ones; (2) the grounding aspect ofthe body acts as a scaffold for articulating thoughtsthat otherwise would be difficult to communicate;and (3) information about the body is included in therepresentations that constitute cognition.

Further examples of the body functioning asa constraint on cognition come from findings inbehavioral psychology. Our judgments about theusability of tools, about the physical properties ofstairs, and about the graspability of objects indeedincorporate anticipated embodied interactions, andare affected both by our bodily features and the motorskills that allow us to cope with those objects andtools.51–53

Another example exemplifying the role of thebody as a constraint on cognition comes fromLawrence Barsalou’s perceptual symbols theory.8,54,55

This theory rests on the assumption that humancognition does not consist of amodal representationsthat bear arbitrary relations to their referents in theworld, but rather of representations whose activationpatterns include information from various sensorymodalities. For example, the symbolic structure thatrepresents an object in its absence, say, duringa memory task, depends upon the same neuralsystem that is recruited when the object is actuallyperceived or acted upon. Thus, not only does cognitiveprocessing essentially reactivate sensorimotor areasin the activity of remembering, but memory itselfmay be built up out of sensorimotor patterns andthus be modal rather than purely symbolic. On sucha view, besides reflecting the nature of embodied

interactions, multimodal representations stored inmemory assist, control, and facilitate perceptualprocessing, reasoning, and situated actions.

The body’s constraining effects on cognitioncan be also seen in relation to language. Sentencecomprehension and construal of meaning are achievedthrough embodied responses and require knowingboth the affordances offered by an object and whetherthey match our sensorimotor capabilities.56–59 Judgingthe meaning of a sentence is faster and more accurate,for example, if the text meaning is compatible withthe body’s biomechanical features.

We should expect, therefore, that differentlyembodied agents will diverge in their conceptualiza-tion of identical situations and that understanding willvary if intelligent systems varied physically. Having adifferent sort of body thus facilitates a different kindof cognitive processing.

Body as Distributor for Cognitive ProcessingAs a cognitive distributor, the body spreads cognitivetasks between neural and non-neural structures, andfunctions as partial realizer of mental phenomena.Striking examples of how non-neural, anatomicalstructures and postures subserve cognitive operationscome from work on language production, corticalplasticity, and hand motor skill acquisition.

Although a speaker’s gestures have been mostlyregarded as communicative, arm and hand movementsin fact play a cognitive role in vocabulary growth andlanguage development.60,61 Cortical representationsare also responsive to changes in the course ofmotor learning. Subjects practicing over a period ofthree weeks either a gross motor activity, such assqueezing a sponge, or a fine motor task, such assequential movements of the middle three fingers,not only improve on unrelated tests of hand andwrist performance but also, more importantly, presenta significant expansion of the primary motor andsomatosensory cortex. The increase of the volumeof cortical movement representations in parallel withthe acquisition of behavioral abilities suggests thatcortical organization is modeled by our embodiedexperiences, and that body-induced changes regulatebrain enhancement, information processing, andcognitive development.62

Consider also studies indicating that motoractivity provides individuals with knowledge sub-sequently used for spatial perception, studies thatmotivate a shift in emphasis concerning the primaryfunction of the visual system35,63: rather than func-tioning to build an accurate three-dimensional rep-resentation of the world, as traditionally assumed,64

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the visual systems primary function is to guide andbe guided by action. What we perceive is determinedby what we do in order to perceive, not solely bywhat happens inside the brain. That we constructa visual representation of the world by taking intoaccount our own movements suggest that, althoughthe brain is still a central part of the visual infor-mation processing system, neural activity alone isinsufficient to explain how perception is achieved. Ifwe were embodied in a radically different manner,we would perceive differently, and in terms of ournew set of bodily characteristics. A view that exclu-sively locates perceptual processing in the brain andsees the nervous system alone as the beginning andend of mental activity fails to appropriately acknowl-edge that bodily activity forms a stage in cognitiveprocessing.

Bodily states also modulate attitude formationand social information processing. Nodding move-ments of one’s head while hearing a message about atopic, as opposed to shaking, increase the likelihoodto rate the message positively,65 and accuracy in clas-sifying facial expressions displayed in photographsdepends on the extent to which individuals are freeto mimic.66 Comprehensive discussion of how bodilyresponses modulate processing of emotional stimuliand increase smoothness of social interaction can befound elsewhere.6

Viewing the role of the body as a distributorfor cognitive processing implies that the body doesnot function merely to transduce perceptual inputsto cognition, and later to produce behavior frominternal cognitive processing, but is more integral tothe control of cognition. This form of the embodi-ment thesis, by allowing that cognitive systems caninclude both non-neural parts of the body and thebeyond-the-body environment, also invites furtherexploration of the idea of extended cognitive sys-tems, where the realizers for cognitive processing are‘wide’.15,46,67–69

CONCLUSIONSTraditional accounts in cognitive science accept theview that cognition is, in essence, the same kind of pro-cess that one can find in a calculator. Yet if proponentsof the embodiment thesis are correct that the bodydoes more than conveying input and output to centralsystems, we should leave behind some methodologicaland conceptual commitments of traditional cognitivescience. Furthermore, cognitive scientists can exploreboth embodied behavior and neural simulations inaccounting for cognitive differences across and withinspecies. Two final general points about the cognitivesciences are worth making in light of this point.

The constraints of embodiment are such thatsubstantive cross-species psychological generaliza-tions are likely to be more limited than traditionalviews in cognitive science, such as functionalism andcomputationalism have led us to expect. Put bluntly,differences in physical realization prevent or limitidentities at the psychological level: conversely, dif-ferences in the kinds of bodies that organisms havetrickle up to create differences in the correspondingpsychology. Thus, cognitive sciences should aim tocapture generalizations that reflect bodily variation inways that, for the most part, they have not.

Finally, philosophers have tended to conceive ofthe reduction of mind to body and the autonomy ofthe psychological as mutually exclusive and exhaus-tive alternatives: the autonomy of psychology is trueif and only if reductionism is false. The embodi-ment thesis provides an alternative perspective onmind-body reductionism that does not rely on thisassumption. As psychology is embodied and com-putational psychology reflects the peculiarities of ourbodies, psychology cannot but be grounded in thefeatures of the agent’s body. But as bodily featuresconstrain or regulate, but rarely strictly determine,the precise nature of ensuing cognitive activity, thereremains also a kind of autonomy to psychologicalprocessing.

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FURTHER READINGWilson RA, Foglia L. Embodied cognition. In: Zalta EN, ed. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition).

WEB RESOURCEShttp://philpapers.org/browse/philosophy-of-mind?catq=embodied+cognition&sort=relevancehttp://www.embodiment.org.uk/bibliog.htm

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