Number concepts: abstract and embodied

Abstract Concepts and Aging: An Embodied and Grounded Perspective

How do we represent abstract concepts, as “justice” and “phantasy”? This issue has become hotly debated within embodied and grounded cognition views (for reviews: Pecher et al., 2011; Dove, 2016; Borghi et al., 2017). It is in fact unclear how such views can explain how we represent concepts that do not have single concrete referents and are rather detached from sensory experience (Barsalou, 20...

Embodied Concepts and Mental Health.

Often drawing on the phenomenological tradition, a number of philosophers and cognitive scientists working in the field of "embodied cognition" subscribe to the general view that cognition is grounded in aspects of its sensorimotor embodiment and should be comprehended as the result of a dynamic interaction of nonneural and neural processes. After a brief introduction, the paper critically enga...

An Embodied View on the Development of Symbolic Capabilities and Abstract Concepts

Until recently, research studies about symbolic representations have mainly focused on concrete language; hence, very little is known about the symbolic/conceptual system governing abstract language. In contrast to concrete entities, which can be perceived through the senses, abstract language refers to things that are intangible and that are not physically defined nor spatially constrained [1,...

Embodied cognition, abstract concepts, and the benefits of new technology for implicit body manipulation

Current approaches on cognition hold that concrete concepts are grounded in concrete experiences. There is no consensus, however, as to whether this is equally true for abstract concepts. In this review we discuss how the body might be involved in understanding abstract concepts through metaphor activation. Substantial research has been conducted on the activation of common orientational metaph...

Why Numbers Are Embodied Concepts