Lang Cogn Neurosci. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2016 May 1.
What is embodied about cognition?
Abstract
It is currently debated whether the meanings of words and objects are represented, in whole or in part, in a modality-specific format—the embodied cognition hypothesis. I argue that the embodied/disembodied cognition debate is either largely resolved in favor of the view that concepts are represented in an amodal format, or at a point where the embodied and disembodied approaches are no longer coherently distinct theories. This merits reconsideration of what the available evidence can tell us about the structure of the conceptual system. We know that the conceptual system engages, online, with sensory and motor content. This frames a new question: How is it that the human conceptual system is able to disengage from the sensorimotor system? Answering this question would say something about how the human mind is able to detach from the present and extrapolate from finite experience to hypothetical states of how the world could be. It is the independence of thought from perception and action that makes human cognition special—and that independence is guaranteed by the representational distinction between concepts and sensorimotor representations.
If I give someone the order “fetch me a red flower from that meadow”, how is he to know what sort of flower to bring, as I have only given him a word?
Now the answer one might suggest first is that he went to look for a red flower carrying a red image in his mind, and comparing it with the flowers to see which of them had the color of the image. ... But this is not the only way of searching and it isn't the usual way. We go, look about us, walk up to a flower and pick it, without comparing it to anything. To see that the process of obeying the order can be of this kind, consider the order “imagine a red patch.” You are not tempted in this case to think that before obeying you must have imagined a red patch to serve as a pattern for the red patch which you were ordered to imagine.
Introduction
The embodied cognition hypothesis is the idea that cognition is mediated by representations expressed in the vocabulary and format of sensory and motor representations. The core of the embodied cognition hypothesis is the claim that the format of cognitive representations is modality-specific and not abstract or amodal. In the last several years there has been an explosion of interest into exploring embodied explanations of varied phenomena (see Figure 1). The focus of the current discussion is on the embodied cognition hypothesis as it applies to conceptual content of concrete object and action concepts. This application of the hypothesis may serve as a litmus test for the embodied approach more generally: if the theory faces difficulties for concrete concepts, it is unlikely that it would work for cognitive domains that are less systematically tied into sensory and motor processing.
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