An embodied approach to understanding: Making sense of the world through simulated bodily activity
Frontiers in Psychology December 22, 2016 Firat Soylu
Understanding is a common but poorly defined psychological construct, studied less than learning or memory. Studying it requires integrating first-person experience, behavior, and neural data. Psychological understanding has been defined as conscious knowing, while a biofunctional approach includes unconscious, implicit, automatic, and intuitive cognition. To bridge these, an embodied and evolutionary perspective situates biofunctional understanding within embodiment theories. Simulation theories of cognition, which treat simulation of sensorimotor and affective states as central, can connect biofunctional and psychological understanding.