What is embodied about cognition?

Abstract

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 favour of the view that concepts are represented in an amodal format, or at a point where the embodied and disembodied approaches are no longer coherently distinct theories. This merits reconsideration of what the available evidence can tell us about the structure of the conceptual system. We know that the conceptual system engages, online, with sensory and motor content. This frames a new question: How is it that the human conceptual system is able to disengage from the sensorimotor system? Answering this question would say something about how the human mind is able to detach from the present and extrapolate from finite experience to hypothetical states of how the world could be. It is the independence of thought from perception and action that makes human cognition special – and that independence is guaranteed by the representational distinction between concepts and sensorimotor representations.

Keywords:

• embodied cognition
• conceptual representation
• semantics
• spreading activation
• representational format

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Alfonso Caramazza, Frank Garcea, Olaf Hauk, David Kemmerer, and Alex Martin for comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

1. To turn this around: it is not obvious how the correct region of motor cortex could come to be activated by a printed word if the word has not been interpreted (i.e., processed conceptually). Or – is motor activation (i.e., conceptual processing) merely a type of associative response to a stimulus?

2. Weak embodiment could be construed as arguing one of three things, which may vary somewhat by author: (1) some concepts are completely embodied, for instance, concrete object concepts and action verbs are represented entirely in a modality-specific format, (2) some concepts are partially embodied, for instance concrete object concepts and action verbs are partly modality-specific and partly amodal or (3) all concepts are partially embodied. The arguments here do not depend on which version of the weakly embodied hypothesis is assumed, but I assume -2- is the version that most have in mind when referring to the ‘weak’ embodied hypothesis.

3. Much (most?) of human cognition is directed at conceptual content that does not have extension in the physical world. Think about the conceptual processing in which the reader has engaged while reading this essay to this point. Setting aside the words ‘kick’, ‘hammer’ and ‘ice cream’: Can you think of any conceptual processing during your reading of this paper that could be embodied? One rejoinder to such points is the observation that we, as long as we are thinking, are in a first person perspective situated in the world and so there are in fact many sensory/motor correlates to even the most abstract of human endeavours. It is true: the rocket scientist may use a paper and pencil and thus engage the sensory/motor system while working through her calculations – but those kinds of sensory/motor processes simply do not offer any purchase for the types of cognitive processes that are occurring.

4. Early formulations of the Sensory/Motor Model (e.g., Martin, Ungerleider, & Haxby, 2000), which presaged much of the discussion about embodied cognition, more clearly endorsed the view that the ability to complete certain types of tasks (e.g., picture naming) involved, necessarily, access to sensory/motor processing. Recent formulations of the Sensory/Motor Model are agnostic about the representational format of conceptual content (see Martin, 2009).

5. This is agnostic about the format of the representations that are involved in visual imagery. In general, the issue of whether concepts are modality-specific in their format is independent of whether imagery (visual imagery, motor imagery) operates over a medium that is modality-specific in its format. However, there are a number of illustrative parallels between the debate about whether or not visual imagery occurs over modality-specific representations, and current discussions about embodied cognition (for discussion, see Hauk & Tschentscher, 2013).

6. This raises the general question: Which activation patterns actually index the retrieval of information that is in a sensory/motor format? There has not been nearly enough serious consideration given to this issue in the empirical literature, especially considering how central it is for the evidential status of sensory/motor activation with respect to the embodied cognition hypothesis. For discussion, see Caramazza et al., 2014; Hauk and Tschentscher, 2013; Martin, 2009; for elegant demonstrations disentangling the levels of processing of putative sensory/motor activations, see Simmons et al. (2007) in the domain of colour, Simmons et al. (2013) in the domain of taste and Postle et al. (2008) in the domain of action words.

Additional information

Funding

Preparation of this article was supported by NSF [grant number 1349042] and NIH [grant number NS076176] to BZM.