Embodied Cognition: A Challenging Road for Clinical Neuropsychology

Clinical neuropsychology (CN) has clearly emerged as a diagnostic discipline, influenced by disembodied and localizationist-connectionist approaches. In this sense, cognition has been understood as a relatively isolated link of perception and movement. The classic model “perception → cognition→ action” has guided the design of instruments and the interpretation of the results in pathological conditions of the central nervous system. This trend has been maintained over time thanks to the convergence of the localizationist approach and computational models of information processing adopted by CN (Shallice, 1988). Recently, embodied cognition (EC) has put the sensory-motor system on the stage of human cognitive neuroscience (Willems and Francken, 2012; Freund et al., 2016). EC proposes that the brain systems underlying perception and action are integrated with cognition in bidirectional pathways (Borghi and Pecher, 2011; Ibáñez et al., 2013; Cardona et al., 2014), highlighting their connection with bodily (Gallese and Lakoff, 2005; Gallese and Sinigaglia, 2011) and emotional (Niedenthal, 2007; De Jaegher et al., 2010) experiences, leading to research programs aimed at demonstrating the influence of action on perception (Proffitt, 2006; Creem-Regehr and Kunz, 2010; Witt, 2011) and high-level cognition (Barrett et al., 2007; Goldin-Meadow and Beilock, 2010; Ibáñez and Manes, 2012). Embodied cognition (EC) findings are gradually leading to an integrative view of mental functions and their interdependence with the context, questioning the validity of the computational paradigm and the localizationalist doctrine in explaining brain functioning and its correspondence with complex behavior. These findings have also given a scientific character to the study of bodily experience in the analysis of brain function. The continuous accumulation of evidence from EC has had both theoretical and experimental influence and is expected to ultimately impact the clinical field. This article presents some of the main challenges that neuropsychology faces in integrating EC in its clinical assessment and diagnosis processes.