Theories on embodied cognition emphasize that our mind develops by processing and inferring structures given the encountered bodily experiences. Here, we propose a distributed neural network architecture that learns a stochastic generative model from experiencing bodily actions. Our modular system learns from various manifolds of action perceptions in the form of (i) relative positional motion ...

It is currently debated whether the meanings of words and objects are represented, in whole or in part, in a modality-specific format-the embodied cognition hypothesis. I argue that the embodied/disembodied cognition debate is either largely resolved in favor of the view that concepts are represented in an amodal format, or at a point where the embodied and disembodied approaches are no longer ...

This paper looks at the intersection between motherhood and online illness narratives, examining ways in which women conceptualise their maternal bodies context of postnatal depression. Specifically, we examine how discourses distress are positioned relation to societal norms expectations, othering ‘imbalanced’ body. To do so, apply corpus assisted discourse analysis posts made Mumsnet Talk for...

The study of evolutionary patterns of cognitive convergence would be greatly helped by a clear demarcation of cognition. Cognition is often used as an equivalent of mind, making it difficult to pin down empirically or to apply it confidently beyond the human condition. Recent developments in embodied cognition and philosophy of biology now suggest an interpretation that dissociates cognition fr...

Who am I? What is the self and where does it come from? This may be one of the oldest problems in philosophy. Beyond traditional philosophy, only very recently approaches from neuroscience (in particular imaging studies) have tried to address these questions, too. So what are neural substrates of our self? An increasing body of evidence has demonstrated that a set of structures labeled as corti...

It is a standard understanding that we live in time. In fact, the whole physical world as described in sciences is based on the idea of objective (not absolute) time. For centuries we have defined time ever so minutely, basing them on finer and finer event measurements (uncoiling springs to atomic clocks) that we do not even notice that we have made an inductive leap when it comes to time we ca...

Approaches to meaning differ in ways as fundamental as the questions they aim to answer. The theoretical outlook described in this chapter, the embodied simulation approach, belongs to the class of perspectives that ask how meaning operates in real time in the brain, mind, and body of language users. Clearly, some approaches to meaning are better suited to this question than others. Mechanistic...

Chapter Overview In the past few decades, many practitioners of cognitive science and philosophy of mind have staked out programs and positions under the label of " embodied cognition " (EC). They have widely differing views, however, of what embodiment consists in and why a program of embodied cognition might be an improvement over classical cognitivism. Frederique de Vignemont and I have rece...

P Fonagy and Mary Target present a broad and provocative argument for the potential contributions of attachment theory to clinical psychoanalysis, together with an analysis of why these contributions have thus far not been realized. Central to the authors’ discussion is the claim that the movement within contemporary cognitive science known as “embodied cognition” provides the theoretical machi...

The paper takes its departure point from a seemingly innocuous idiom that common English parlance uses to describe person who has lost possession of their rational mind: “not all there.” Interrogating the locality this deictic “there” implies, argument juxtaposes it with recent religious scholarship on Afterlife, which posits that, by extension, absence risen Christ tomb, Christian subject is e...