Commentary: The poverty of embodied cognition
Frontiers in Psychology May 23, 2017 Kinga Wołoszyn, Mateusz Hohol 26 citations
A long-standing view in cognitive science holds that higher thinking uses abstract, amodal mental representations and brain regions separate from sensorimotor areas. Over recent decades, many researchers have instead argued that cognition is fundamentally grounded in sensorimotor activity and bodily constraints, a position called embodied cognition (EC). However, Goldinger et al. (2016) challenged EC's applicability, asserting that some of its assumptions are unacceptable and others offer nothing new, particularly for experimental psychology. This paper agrees with some criticisms—such as that radical embodiment rejecting mental representation is a dead end—but argues that the authors' methodological perspective on EC is inadequate.