The architecture of embodied cue integration: insight from the “motivation as cognition” perspective

Citation: Shalev I (2015) The architecture of embodied cue integration: insight from the " motivation as cognition " perspective. Front. Psychol. 6:658. At the core of embodied cognition research is the assumption that higher level processing is grounded in the organism's lower level sensory and motor experiences (Barsalou, 1999, 2008; Meier et al., 2012; Winkielman et al., 2015b). Past research of perceptual multimodal cue integration has demonstrated that several mechanisms underlie perceptual integration (Treisman and Gelade, 1980; Zmigrod and Hommel, 2013). Based on embodied cognition theory, which indicates that activation automatically spreads from concepts driven by experiences in the physical world to their metaphorically-related social concepts (for reviews, Williams et al., 2009; Meier et al., 2012), it was proposed that to produce action, embodied cues associate between lower level and higher level cues. However, little is known about the factors that modulate this integration. This gap in the literature is of relevance because research of embodied cognition has demonstrated that perceptual symbols can lead to different patterns of activation across different contexts (Barsalou, 2008), which makes predictions about judgment and behavior difficult. For example, the associations between physical warmth/coldness and psychological warmth/coldness across different contexts yielded both assimilative effects (e.g., physical warmth increases psychological warmth) (Williams and Bargh, 2008) and contrast effects (e.g., physical coldness increases the need for social warmth) Following the recent pragmatic turn in cognitive science, according to which cognitive processes and their underlying neural activity patterns should be studied primarily with respect to their roles in action generation (Glenberg et al., 2013), I argue that embodied cues are integrated according to their momentary functions within each individual's system of goals. Conceptualized as cognitive representations of desired end-points that affect evaluations, emotions and behaviors (Fishbach and Ferguson, 2007), goals serve as reference points toward which behavior is directed. I suggest that analyzing embodied cue integration from the " motivation as cognition " perspective (Kruglanski et al., 2002) may add to our understanding of which cues are perceived, what response is determined as appropriate in a given situation, and why different judgments and behaviors may be elicited by the activation of similar sets of embodied cues. In the sections below, I will discuss three types of constraints that stem from the " motivation as cognition " perspective, including the motivational properties of embodied cue integration (Eitam and Higgins, 2010), the allocational properties of embodied cue integration (based on …