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Embodied Social Cognition pp 81–113Cite as

Embodied Cognitive Science

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Part of the book series: Cognitive Systems Monographs ((COSMOS,volume 26))

Abstract

This chapter describes why and how embodied and situated approaches to cognition became relevant in the mid-1980s. It also offers an overview of basic ideas, characteristics, levels and concepts relevant to embodied cognitive science. Subsequently it portrays different approaches to, and views of, embodiment and embodied cognition in current embodied cognitive science, and also discusses several notions and aspects of embodiment as well as what kind of a body is required for natural cognition and artificial intelligence (AI). In the chapter, the significance of movement in embodied cognition is especially considered, and the concept of the body in motion is introduced. Finally, the social dimension of embodiment is briefly discussed.

We need to find a cure for the Cartesian sickness.

Michael H. Agar, 2005

Perhaps the most obvious, and most overlooked, aspect of human intelligence is that it is embodied.

Brooks et al., 1999

There is now enough empirical evidence to reject a disembodied theory of the mind as biologically implausible.

Gallese, 2004

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The connection between situated and embodied cognition, however, is far from being definite or well-defined, but they have similar historical roots and can be considered as alternatives against computationalism (cf. e.g. [1–5]).

  2. 2.

    It should be noted, however, that in order to present and discuss the different concepts, each researcher’s own vocabulary is used, and there is no explicit interpretation made regarding the relation between the terms ‘views’, ‘notions’ and ‘levels’.

  3. 3.

    Some tentative alternative terms for online cognition could be ‘first-order situatedness’ or ‘primary situatedness’. Clark’s surrogate situatedness can then be considered as ‘second-order situatedness’ or ‘secondary situatedness’. For offline cognition I suggest ‘third-order situatedness’ or ‘tertiary situatedness’. I am thankful to my colleague Henrik Svensson for discussing these concepts.

  4. 4.

    It should be noted that there is an ongoing debate concerning the role of internal representations by proponents of embodied cognition, who usually stress the use of situative resources in a situation more than the possible occurrence of internal representations as a result of the time-pressure (see e.g. [8, 10, 52–58]).

  5. 5.

    It should be noted that Vygotsky himself never used the term scaffolding , instead it was coined by Wood et al. [62]. According to personal communication with Maurio Goulder in 2002, Wood and Bruner were actually the first Westerners to access Vygotsky’s follower Galperin’s work, but they did not acknowledge Galperin’s work in their well-known article. Galperin investigated the impact of different kinds of instruction on problem-solving processes (see Susi [65]). However, the spreading of Galperin’s idea to the Western world was delayed due to the political climate.

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    Jessica Lindblom

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Lindblom, J. (2015). Embodied Cognitive Science. In: Embodied Social Cognition. Cognitive Systems Monographs, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20315-7_3

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