Embodied cognition

Proponents of the embodied cognition thesis emphasize the active and significant role the body plays in the shaping of cognition and in the understanding of an agent's mind and cognitive capacities. In philosophy, embodied cognition holds that an agent's cognition, rather than being the product of mere (innate) abstract representations of the world, is strongly influenced by aspects of an agent's body beyond the brain itself. An embodied model of cognition opposes the disembodied Cartesian model, according to which all mental phenomena are non-physical and, therefore, not influenced by the body. With this opposition the embodiment thesis intends to reintroduce an agent's bodily experiences into any account of cognition. It is a rather broad thesis and encompasses both weak and strong variants of embodiment. In an attempt to reconcile cognitive science with human experience, the enactive approach to cognition defines "embodiment" as follows:

By using the term embodied we mean to highlight two points: first that cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and second, that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological and cultural context.

— The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience by Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, pages 172–173.

This double sense attributed to the embodiment thesis emphasizes the many aspects of cognition that researchers in different fields—such as philosophy, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, psychology, and neuroscience—are involved with. This general characterization of embodiment faces some difficulties: a consequence of this emphasis on the body, experience, culture, context, and the cognitive mechanisms of an agent in the world is that often distinct views and approaches to embodied cognition overlap. The theses of extended cognition and situated cognition, for example, are usually intertwined and not always carefully separated. …

The theory of embodied cognition, along with the multiple aspects it comprises, can be regarded as the imminent result of an intellectual skepticism towards the flourishment of the disembodied theory of mind put forth by René Descartes in the 17th century. According to Cartesian dualism, the mind is entirely distinct from the body and can be successfully explained and understood without reference to the body or to its processes.

Research has been done to identify the set of ideas that would establish what could be considered as the early stages of embodied cognition around inquiries regarding the mind–body–soul relation and vitalism in the German tradition from 1740 to 1920. The modern approach and definition of embodied cognition has a relatively short history. Intellectual underpinnings of embodied cognition can be traced back to the influence of philosophy and, more specifically, the phenomenological tradition, psychology, and connectionism in the 20th century.

Phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty served as a source of inspiration for what would later be known as the embodiment thesis. They stood up against the mechanistic and disembodied approach to the explanation of the mind by emphasizing the fact that there are aspects of human experiences (consciousness, cognition) that cannot simply be explained by a model of the mind as computation of inner symbols. From a phenomenological standpoint, such aspects remain unaccountable if, as in Cartesian dualism, they are not "deeply rooted in the physical nuts-and-bolts of the interacting agent". Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception, for example, rejects the Cartesian idea that people's primary mode of being in the world is thinking and proposes corporeity, that is, the body itself as the primary site for knowing the world, and perception as the medium and the pre-reflective foundation of experience.

The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be intervolved in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them.

So stated, the body is the primary condition for experience since it comprises a collection of active meanings about the world and its objects. …

Embodied cognition argues that several factors both internal and external (such as the body and the environment) play a role in the development of an agent's cognitive capacities, just as mental constructs (such as thoughts and desires) are said to influence an agent's bodily actions. For this reason, embodied cognition is considered a wide-ranging research program, rather than a well-defined and unified theory. A scientific approach to embodied cognition reaches, inspires, and brings together ideas from several research areas, each with its own take on embodiment yet in a joint effort to (methodically) investigate embodied cognition.

Research on embodied cognition comprises a variety of fields within the sciences such as linguistics, neuroscience, (cognitive) psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, robotics, etc. For this reason, contemporary developments in embodied cognition can be regarded as the embodied make-over of cognitive science offering new ways to look at the nature, structure, and mechanisms of cognition. Embodying cognition requires the different features of cognition such as perception, language, memory, learning, reasoning, emotion, self-regulation, and its social aspects to be revisited and investigated through the lens of embodiment in order to ground its theoretical and methodological underpinnings.

Embodied cognition has gained the attention and interest of classical cognitive science (along with all sciences it comprises) to incorporate embodiment ideas into its research. In linguistics, George Lakoff (a cognitive scientist and linguist) and his collaborators Mark Johnson, Mark Turner, and Rafael E. Núñez have promoted and expanded the embodiment thesis based on developments within the field of cognitive science. Their research has provided evidence suggesting that people use their understanding of familiar physical objects, actions, and situations to understand other domains. All cognition is based on the knowledge that comes from the body and other disciplines are mapped onto humans' embodied knowledge using a combination of conceptual metaphor, image schema and prototypes.

The conceptual metaphors research have argued that people use metaphors all over to be in charge of the conceptual level; in other words, they map one conceptual state into another one. …

Over the past years, embodied cognition research has gradually redeemed the scientific study of bodily experiences and simultaneously laid a theoretical and empirical foundation across multiple disciplines. Principles and findings underlying embodied cognition have begun to be transferred and applied in several fields ranging from education, robotics, clinical settings, social psychology, sports, to music.

Embodied cognition findings have been translated into an overhaul of educational and teaching practices in favor of embodied learning and teaching methods. In particular, such embodied practices feature prominently in science education. For example, Energy Theater is a method for teaching about energy dynamics based on the embodied interaction theory. In this method, participants each play the role of a unit of energy, and together, they enact the transformation and transfer of energy in specific scenarios.

The Human Orrery is another embodied educational method in which students learn about the Solar System through enactment. In this method, the position of the planets is marked by disks, and the participants enact the role of the planets by moving on their orbits.

In a survey from 2020, researchers analyzed several frameworks that bring embodied cognition theory into clever classroom practices for the teaching and learning of mathematics. The embodied design-based research program identifies and classifies at least two forms of embodied designs: perception and action-based designs. In perception-based designs, the target is a/b concepts such as likelihood, slope, and proportional equivalence in geometrical similitude. The first step in this design involves asking students to use their naïve worldview to judge a set of material presented to them by their teacher, which affirms their naïve worldview. Afterward, teachers provide students with appropriate media and attempt to guide them to build models by following the formal procedure. In action-based designs, learners are presented with sensorimotor problems. Abrahamson and colleagues developed the "Mathematical Imagery Trainer" platform to explore this design. In one particular version of this platform, designed to teach proportions to learners, they moved two cursors with both hands to turn a screen green. …

Research on embodied cognition is extremely broad, covering a wide range of concepts. Methods to study how human cognition is embodied vary from experiment to experiment based on the operational definition used by researchers. The evidence supporting embodiment abounds within the different sciences, yet the interpretation of results and their significance are still disputed and researchers continue looking for appropriate ways to study and explain embodied cognition.

Interbrain neuroscience research in adults and growing evidence of goal-directed behavior in fetuses raise doubts regarding independence and self-sufficiency of the embodied cognition position. Indeed, there are severe concerns about this viewpoint as the only possible way to explain cognitive development in organisms at an early stage; it seems that the complex process of emerging cognition requires complementary views.

The binding problem is the viewpoint on how organisms at the simple reflexes stage of development overcome the threshold of the environmental chaos of sensory stimuli. Using mathematical tools of communication theory, it shows the insuperable high threshold of the cacophony of environmental stimuli (the stimuli noise) for young organisms at the onset of life. While young organisms need to combine objects, backgrounds, and abstract or emotional features into a single experience to build a surrounding reality, they cannot independently distinguish relevant sensory stimuli. Even the embodied dynamical system approach cannot get around the cue to noise problem. This ability requires categorizing the environment into objects that come into being through (and only after) perception and intentionality. Embodied cognition position does not solve this problem.

Researchers have suggested that pre-verbal infants may be considered an ideal and naturalistic case for studying embodied cognition, especially embodied social cognition since they utilise symbols less than adults do. Some researchers have criticised this notion since it may be impossible to know which stage of a preverbal infant is supposed to be the "ideal model" for embodied social cognition, as infant cognition changes dramatically throughout the preverbal period. …