Topics in Cognitive Science 4 (2012) 685691 Copyright 2012 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved.

. ISSN: 1756-8757 print / 1756-8765 online DOI: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2012.01227.x

Embodied Cognition as a Practical Paradigm: Introduction to the Topic, The Future of Embodied Cognition
Joshua Ian Davis,a Arthur B. Markmanb
a

Department of Psychology, Barnard College of Columbia University b Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin Received 10 August 2012; accepted 12 August 2012

Abstract Embodied cognition pertains to the consequences on thought and emotion of living with our particular human sensory and motor systems. The consequences are quite varied, and researchers across the cognitive sciences have made great discoveries in line with this principle. However, while we offer this principle, it is necessarily broad, and searching for a single unifying theme has not brought researchers together behind a clearly dened endeavor. Rather than attempt to do so, we embrace the variation and specicity in research endeavors across the cognitive sciences to forge a practical sense in which embodied cognition can be a useful paradigm within which to think and work. This topic, The Future of Embodied Cognition, includes contributions from eight sets of authors communicating how embodied cognition has and will inuence specic approaches within their disciplines. Through this format, the lessons from each contribution can be easily shared with colleagues across disciplines. As these lessons continue to be shared, a paradigm that is of practical use will emerge, and its coherence across disciplines will follow. To illustrate the practical aspect of this approach, in this introductory paper, we take one lesson from each contribution that must be shared and illustrate how each lesson can apply to a single, specic topic of study. Keywords: Interoception; Social psychology; Cognitive psychology; Developmental psychology; Philosophy; Robotics; Cognitive linguistics; Application

Although a number of studies and theoretical accounts of embodied cognition have appeared in the recent literature, there is a question about whether embodied cognition is comprehensible as a single idea, and thus whether it is a worthwhile framework. Some argue that although we can point to shared insight, there has not been enough substance to pull the work together. The rise of embodied cognition across the cognitive sciences has been driven

Correspondence should be sent to Joshua Ian Davis, Department of Psychology, Barnard College of Columbia University, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027. E-mail: jdavis@barnard.edu

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by the understanding that the mind cannot be understood as a computer-like information processor alone, independent of the particular sensory input and motor output systems to which it is connected. Rather, there is value in considering how we think and emote as a result of our particular sensory and motor systems. It is hard to evaluate broad proposals for embodied cognition, however, because they often make few specic testable predictions (e.g., Barsalou, 2008; Glenberg, 2010). As an alternative, the approach of this collection of papers is to embrace the diversity in the topics we study across disciplines, to focus on specic research programs in those disciplines, and to provide a forum in which insights from across disciplines can inspire colleagues from other disciplines. As researchers develop their ideas on these shared presuppositions, a coherent paradigm will emerge, and this paradigm will likely allow us to see solutions to our respective research questions in novel ways. This collection of papers, The Future of Embodied Cognition, provides lessons of specic kinds from each of eight sets of authors. These lessons concern (a) the way embodied cognition is used in their disciplines, (b) the trends that currently exist in these disciplines, and (c) the direction that embodied cognition is taking in these disciplines. In this introductory paper, we highlight one lesson of immediate value from each discipline, which we believe has not yet adequately entered the shared thought lexicon. When rst reading each lesson, it may not be clear how one might apply it. Thus, to illustrate, we offer an example topic and point toward how each lesson might inuence thinking on that topic, as we introduce that lesson. As our example, consider the role of the amygdala in emotion. The amygdala has been shown to be active in fear (LeDoux, 1996). One could ask whether fear therefore happens in the amygdala, whether the amygdala is responsible for the experience, whether it computes the degree of threat, whether it detects unusual patterns, or so on. How does one determine what the amygdala computes? To begin, we turn to lesson 1, from this Topics discussion of Interoception (Herbert & Pollatos, 2012). Lesson 1, Interoception as mechanism: If we take embodied cognition seriously, then a variety of states of the body should inuence psychological processing, which includes our ability to sense changes in bodily state. The sense of the physiological condition of the body is now being implicated in a host of phenomena, from normal emotional experience, to body image disorders, to having a sense of self. Neuroimaging based on our understanding of interoception has been a key to illuminating which processes make use of this sense. Research on interoception is poised to help reveal mechanisms behind the phenomena described in each of the other disciplines. Rather than focus on what part of fear the amygdala computes, an alternative approach recognizes that the amygdala is ideally suited to coordinated autonomic responses (Schwaber, Kapp, & Higgins, 1980). When activated by the site of smoke in the next room, and thoughts of feeling trapped, it might trigger an autonomic response. That autonomic activity will, in turn, activate sensory nerves eventually projecting to the anterior insula (Craig, 2002), which is often active during emotional responding (Kober et al., 2008), and from there, one can further trace projections, and so on. In this context, the amygdala is an essential piece of the emotional reaction of fear, but its role makes most sense in the context of the streams of processing through which it is situated.

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Lesson 2, from Social Psychology (Meier, Schnall, Schwarz, & Bargh, this issue), Individual differences: Many lines of research have asked whether bodily movements, bodily capacities, or body-related metaphors can inuence thoughts and emotions. However, there may be a great deal of individual difference in the degrees to which people are affected by these factors. Thus, the real story can often lie in examining which beliefs, tendencies, and motivations lead a person to be more or less inuenced by body-related processes. To illustrate how this can be relevant, consider that there are individual differences in the degree to which people have biases toward members of their in-group (e.g., based on race, politics, or sports) and away from members of an out-group. Consider someone who sees another person across the room. The person is less likely to be perceived as a threat if he or she is part of that individuals in-group than part of an out-group (Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2003). Stimuli associated with threat activate the amygdala. Individual differences in strength of in-group out-group biases may offer a parametrically varying construct of empirical value to our example. This kind of individual difference provides an opportunity to explore what brain or cognitive processes play a role in potentiating or decreasing amygdala reactivity in fear. A researcher might examine which processes correspond to both amygdala reactivity and differences in strength of group-related bias. Through that, we can discover more about factors that ready the amygdala to potentiate a fear sequence. Lesson 3, from Cognitive Psychology (Anderson, Richardson, & Chemero, this issue), Information processing remains, but what information is processed changes: The information processing model that has dominated cognitive psychology needs to be expanded to include interactions between the body and the environment. These body-environment interactions place constraints on the way that information is processed. The amygdala might be said to compute fear, in the sense that inputs enter in the form of properties of a stimulus, and then output is in the form of a degree of fear one should experience. Alternative computations, however, can be described. To aid in this discussion, consider the case of being trapped in an alley. The ways that an individual can interact with the alley and other inhabitants greatly determine both the possible responses one might have, as well as the amount of fear one might experience. Rather than computing a degree of fear, the amygdala can be viewed as computing whether input from a number of sources (pertaining, e.g., to ones self-defense training, ones level of exhaustion, and the relative size of alley and inhabitants) should sum sufciently to activate an endocrine, autonomic, and skeletomuscular reaction to ght, scream, run, or even laugh. Thus, there is clearly a computation that can be described, but the embodied approach suggests a different kind of computation. It is, moreover, a computation that would be meaningless without unique information about the individual, the environment, and their potential and kinetic interrelation. Lesson 4, from Development and Learning (Kontra, Goldin-Meadow, & Beilock, this issue), Actions role in learning: Action plays a role in learning. There are many ways it does so, including building references for conceptual knowledge, preparing for expert perception, and guiding the comprehension of new material. It is also a primary component of learning, in that it begins to be important in infancy, and the mechanisms by which action is important in learning appear to be the same throughout life.

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How might this apply to our example? One proposed role of the amygdala is to associate a stimulus with a fear response (LeDoux, 1996). There is a sense in which this is seen as a relatively passive process. For example, when the stimulus co-occurs with a fear response, with the right timing, and lack of alternative stimuli, then conditioning will occur. However, stimulus-fear pairings may not be entirely passive. Consider an ambiguous social situation in which a foreign traveler is trying to learn about whether to trust or fear different people he or she encounters. His or her actions quite likely inuence his or her understanding of a situation. Whomever he or she approaches might be trusted more as a result, as approachrelated actions can yield positive evaluation (Cacioppo, Priester, & Berntson, 1993). In what ways, the amygdala researcher might ask, does an approach action involve neural circuitry that inhibits certain amygdala responses? Lesson 5, from Philosophy (Kiverstein, this issue), Assumptions about the role of computation inuence which hypotheses we test: A distinction has emerged between two views of what it means to say that the mind is embodied. The rst view is a view of the body as a source of information to central processors, and the second view is one that the body is an important part of the processing structure of cognition. Testing which of these views is correct (or when each is) is a thorny challenge in psychology (e.g., Meier, Schnall, Schwarz, & Bargh, this issue). And yet philosophical arguments illustrate how one view may reduce to the other when we consider each a type of computation. The study of the amygdala, as involved in fear, provides a level of specicity with which a modeler can compare what these two kinds of computations might look like. The notion of bodily input as a source of information is likely to guide the modeler to attempt to fully describe types of bodily input without reference to how that information will be used by the fear processor. In contrast, the notion of bodily input as part of the computation is likely to lead the modeler to attempt to describe the ways in which bodily input serves as content for variables, or as steps in a procedure, or other subprocedural aspects of a computation. The amygdala researcher pondering this question might see the amygdala in terms of a system that interprets information about the body, or as one that serves more as steps in a subprocedure. If a modeler were to undertake to describe both alternatives, the degree to which the two alternatives differ in meaningful ways (or not) would become apparent. Lesson 6, from Robotics (Hoffman, this issue), Human-like uency as a guiding principle: When embodied robotics rst began, researchers attempted to perform simple tasks like obstacle avoidance and navigation using only low-level connections between perceptual and motor systems without complex internal representations (e.g., Brooks, 1991). More recent work in this area contains more sophisticated representations that are rooted in the relationship between sensor and effector systems. These robots display human-like uency in their physical interactions with people, because of the representations they construct to represent their surroundings. These representations are more enduring than in older robots and reect a principle of integrating representations of sensory input with those of motor control. Lessons from robotics may inform our example. Amygdalar-mediated fear reactions are quick and coordinated. That is the essence of uency. Thus, it is likely that the amygdala takes advantage of processes that aid uency. A researcher considering such processes might shift focus from the stimulus itself to the perceptual symbol systems that may marry

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expectations with sensory input. A representation emerging from the latter is likely what gets paired with a fear reaction during fear learning. After all, the same stimulus (e.g., a gun-shaped object) is not the same in a toy store and a battleground. From a cognitive vantage point, the researcher is then apt to include context, prior experience, and perceptual similarity, and so on in the description of the eliciting event. From a neural perspective, the researcher is likely to include greater consideration of the points of neural convergence on the pathway from sense organ to amygdala, in the description of important steps. Lesson 7, from Cognitive Linguistics (Lakoff, this issue), Combining neural principles with theories of metaphor: Neuroscience is now pointing the way toward understanding what it can mean to claim that embodied conceptual metaphors have a clear source domain (donating meaning) and clear target domain (appropriating meaning). This is a critical piece of an argument that embodied experience is a source of conceptual structure, rather than just one side of a linguistic (or neural) coincidence. The amygdalar circuitry involved in coordinating fear reactions is phylogenetically old and has likely been strengthened by a good deal of use by the time one reaches adulthood. Thus, it is an excellent potential source of meaning in a fear-related metaphor, which can help bring meaning to a target domain. Considering the amygdalar circuitry as a metaphor source domain suggests that, while there are many and varied fear-related metaphors, reasoning based on each will share structural similarities that follow the processing dynamics of the amygdala and its associated circuitry. For example, a person might view his or her job as one in which his or her superiors are always hunting him or her, and he or she is running scared. In contrast, a person might be asked to take on more work when already overwhelmed and feel like a deer caught in the headlights. These metaphors are quite different, and they can lead to different inferences about how to approach work. And yet some properties, such as the urgency, lack of perspective, and reliance on away, rather than toward, motivation, may be activated in very similar ways. Lesson(s) 8, from the essay on application of embodied cognition (Davis, Benforado, Esrock, Turner, Dalton, van Noorden, & Leman, this issue), Ramications of embodied cognition in applied areas suggest new basic science questions: People are protably reevaluating the humanities, arts, law, and creative realms of cognition in light of embodied cognition. Legal thinking suggests that our notions of culpability and fairness are likely to change as a result of the embodied cognition paradigm taking hold. Built spaces are likely going to be designed to maximize the way a human makes sense of a space. That sense has at its core a resonance with aspects of the environment that are linear and straight with respect to a persons body when he or she moves through the space. Art and literature may partially derive meaning for an observer from a process of substituting bodily reactivity for some of the content, to provide a felt sense of the content. Findings on embodied music cognition suggest that people respond especially to rhythms of 2 Hz because of our biomechanics. Building on just one of these points, consider the lessons from an application of embodied cognition to law. One could extrapolate from it that our notions of responsibility for our actions are shifting as a result of the new paradigm. If so, then it makes sense to explore in greater depth just what aspects of the sequence from stimulus to fear reaction we do have control over, to what degree, and what we mean by control.

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Viewed all together, embodied cognition is about the consequences on thought and emotion of existing as a human body. We have not said in a human body nor having a body, but existing as one. We use this phrasing to highlight that having a body is not a state, but rather an active element of cognitive processing. Such consequences of existing as a human body have been explored in many different ways, and we have reached a point in the cognitive sciences where there is so much work being done within each discipline that the intradisciplinary ndings do not always seem to make contact with those from other disciplines. As a result, it can be difcult to nd a common thread among the different research programs in this area. For example, linguists have noted the regular use of embodied metaphors to describe the world (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Roboticists recognized the value of ofoading mental work onto the environment (Brooks, 1991). Neuroscientists discovered shared use of motor systems in perception and social understanding (Keysers & Gazzola, 2006; Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Gallese, & Fogassi, 1996). Computer scientists designed neural networks that could act more human than could computers that were based on serial computation (Medler, 1998). Developmental psychologists illustrated how bodily interactions form a basis for learning (Smith & Gasser, 2005), and the list goes on. It is hard to nd a discipline within the cognitive sciences in which such discoveries have not been made. By focusing within independent disciplines, scholars have discovered distinct lessons that must be shared across disciplines. In our view, different work across disciplines will start to be recognizably part of the same endeavor, when we share the lessons from each discipline with each other at regular intervals. From our vantage point, these insights continue to reect a shift in basic assumptions about what constitutes the mind. Unlike the cognitive revolution, this embodied revolution has not been sudden and jarring, but gradual and subtle until a larger framework became clear. The mind is becoming re-tethered to biology. As we cross-germinate one anothers elds with the important lessons from our own, this paradigmatic change will be a self-fullling prophecy. We close by suggesting that this shift may have profound consequences beyond our academic discussions. Consider that being overweight is not just a body issue. It changes ones movement and blood ow and many factors that we know are part of systems involved in thought and emotion. Or consider psycho-somaticisms, placebo effects, and pain management. They shift from the realm in which our questions are of the form is this possible? to the realm of mechanismwhat bodily neural processes are inuenced by or inuence placebo-expectations, emotions, error detection in the environment, health consequences of social rejection, and so on? The answers to these questions will have considerable practical signicance. The embodied cognition paradigm is redirecting what it is that must be explained by the cognitive sciences. That is no small shift.

Note We dedicate this topic to the memory of our dear colleague, Alasdair Turner.

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Acknowledgments This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation grant BCS 1002595 (to J.I.D.).

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