An Introduction to Embodied Cognition

How to study the mind: An introduction to embodied cognition

Embodied Cognition (EC) is a comprehensive approach to, and framework for, the study of the mind. EC treats cognition as a coordinated set of tools evolved by organisms for coping with their environments. Each of the key terms in this characterization—tool, evolved, organism, coping, and environment—has a special significance for understanding the mind that is discussed in this article. Althoug...

Embodied Cognition as a Practical Paradigm: Introduction to the Topic, The Future of Embodied Cognition

Embodied cognition pertains to the consequences on thought and emotion of living with our particular human sensory and motor systems. The consequences are quite varied, and researchers across the cognitive sciences have made great discoveries in line with this principle. However, while we offer this principle, it is necessarily broad, and searching for a single unifying theme has not brought re...

Introduction to the Special Topic Embodied and Grounded Cognition

The Challenges The Challenge To aCCounT for absTraCT ConCepTs Most studies of E and G cognition have focused on concrete objects and actions. People can also represent and reason about abstract concepts that do not have many sensory–motor features, however, and there is not much evidence yet on grounding of abstract concepts in sensory–motor systems (for a review, see Pecher et al., 2011). Thus...

kant on the embodied cognition

Introduction: Memory, Embodied Cognition, and the Extended Mind

I introduce the seven papers in this special issue, by Andy Clark, Jérôme Dokic, Richard Menary, Jenann Ismael, Sue Campbell, Doris McIlwain, and Mark Rowlands. This paper explains the motivation for an alliance between the sciences of memory and the extended mind hypothesis. It examines in turn the role of worldly, social, and internalized forms of scaffolding to memory and cognition, and also...