Mainstream psychology treats the brain like a computer that processes sensory input and produces motor output, separating it from the body and environment. This view overlooks the deep connections between organisms and their surroundings, leading to a misunderstanding of both human and nonhuman cognition. The author argues for an embodied, enactive, and mutualistic perspective that asks better questions about how animals know their worlds, avoiding the anthropocentric biases of the cognitivist approach.
Embodied cognition, which rejects mind-body dualism and sees a deep link between physical action and abstract thought, remains a promising framework for studying cognition, culture, and evolution. This introduction to a theme issue on embodied cognition in the age of generative AI identifies two key themes: the role of language and its entanglement with the body, and bodily mechanisms of interpersonal perception and alignment in social affiliation, teaching, and learning. The authors conclude that realizing the full potential of embodied approaches will require greater integration across disciplines and openness to different viewpoints about why embodiment matters.
4E cognition provides a biologically grounded alternative to classic cognitivism, arguing that bodies evolved before brains and that cognition must be understood as the ability of organisms to coordinate and control action in a dynamic environment. The chapter introduces minimal criteria for cognition from a biogenic approach, links the origins of cognition to sensorimotor coordination via the skin-brain thesis (early nervous systems enabled coordinated contractions across myoepithelia), and discusses how radical enactivism offers a view of evolutionary continuity that resists anthropocentric tendencies in traditional cognitivism.