1. mixingmemory
  2. "Six Views of Embodied Cognition"

"Six Views of Embodied Cognition"

By mixingmemory on November 27, 2006.

Those of you interested in embodied cognition, and issues of knowledge representation, should find this paper interesting:

Wilson, M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 9(4), 625-636.

Abstract

The emerging viewpoint of embodied cognition holds that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body's interactions with the world. This position actually houses a number of distinct claims, some of which are more controversial than others. This paper distinguishes and evaluates the following six claims: (1) cognition is situated; (2) cognition is time-pressured; (3) we off-load cognitive work onto the environment; (4) the environment is part of the cognitive system; (5) cognition is for action; (6) offline cognition is body based. Of these, the first three and the fifth appear to be at least partially true, and their usefulness is best evaluated in terms of the range of their applicability. The fourth claim, I argue, is deeply problematic. The sixth claim has received the least attention in the literature on embodied cognition, but it may in fact be the best documented and most powerful of the six claims.

Tags
cognitive psychology

More like this

Conceptual Metaphor Comment by Dr. Gibbs
In the previous entry, I made some disparaging remarks about conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), and George Lakoff specifically. I also noted that, in my experience,, the psycholinguist Raymond Gibbs, Jr. is the only one in the cognitive linguistics who seriously addresses the evidence and…
Action and Meaning
Throughout the brief history of cognitive science, debates over the nature of knowledge representation have raged. In the 1970s, the debate was between those who thought that knowledge was represented as images -- modal, or sensory representations -- and those who thought that knowledge was…
Embodied Language and Expertise
One of the more sophisticated theories in embodied cognition is Lawrence Barsalou's perceptual symbol systems theory. It is, in essence, an updated version of the "ideas as images" position of the British empiricists, and the mental imagery theories of the seventies1. The basics of the theory are…
New Cognitive Science Books
Over the next few months, several cognitive science books will be coming out that look really interesting. I thought I'd list a few of them, in case you're interested in checking them out once they're published. The Prehistory of Cognitive Science - Andrew Brook, Editor Description Featuring…

Thanks for the paper! I'm actually pretty interested in Embodied and Situated Cognition -- and one of the papers I found useful was this survey paper by Michael Anderson: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/anderson03embodied.html

I came to Embodied Cognition from the AI/Computer Science persepective and am currently making a list of books that I need to read to know more. I can't really read all the books that I've found so far (most from the bibliography of the Anderson survey) but I'd really like to isolate all the references to some core papers/books on EC. Any suggestions, tips?

Thanks Fido. I think I used the url that you get after you select whether you want it all at once or a page at a time, and apparently, that url's temporary.