Cortex
February 14, 2026
David Kemmerer, Guy Dove
The Default Mode Network (DMN) is a collection of interconnected transmodal cortical areas that was originally found to be engaged when people do not focus on external sensory stimuli but instead attend to their inner thoughts. More recent experiments have shown that it is also recruited during externally oriented tasks that require the processing of concepts, including the increasingly complex...
Cognitive Neuroscience
2024
Guy Dove
1 citation
Mougenot and Matheson outline a theoretical approach to cognitive neuroscience that combines the commitments of embodied cognition with a mechanistic approach to scientific explanation. They argue that this theoretical approach provides several general benefits, including enabling researchers to develop more robust theories and ontologies that do not require either neuroscientific reductionism...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
December 26, 2022
Guy Dove
There has been a lot of recent interest in the way that language might enhance embodied cognition. This interest is driven in large part by a growing body of evidence implicating the language system in various aspects of semantic memory—including, but not limited to, its apparent contribution to abstract concepts. In this essay, I develop and defend a novel account of the cognitive role played...
April 13, 2022
Guy Dove
Abstract Our thoughts depend on knowledge about objects, people, properties, and events. In order to think about where we left our keys, what we are going to make for dinner, when we last fed the dogs, and how we are going to survive our next visit with our family, we need to know something about locations, keys, cooking, dogs, survival, families, and so on. Researchers have sought to explain...
Abstract Concepts and the Embodied Mind
April 13, 2022
Guy Dove
Abstract This chapter critically examines the empirical support for embodied and grounded cognition. The evidence typically cited in this context characteristically involves concrete concepts and implicates perception and action systems in their processing. Rehearsing this evidence has become something of a touchstone in the field of embodied cognition—papers regularly begin with a quick...
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
August 1, 2016
Guy Dove
A great deal of research has focused on the question of whether or not concepts are embodied as a rule. Supporters of embodiment have pointed to studies that implicate affective and sensorimotor systems in cognitive tasks, while critics of embodiment have offered nonembodied explanations of these results and pointed to studies that implicate amodal systems. Abstract concepts have tended to be...