Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
June 9, 2016
S. Goldinger, Megan H. Papesh, Anthony S. Barnhart et al.
324 citations
Embodied cognition proposes that cognitive processes are shaped by the body, exist to guide action, are situated in the environment, and may not require internal representations. Proponents view it as a paradigm shift for cognitive science. This critical analysis argues that the core ideas are either too vague—such as the claim that perception is influenced by the body—or offer nothing new, like the observations that cognition evolved for survival, emotions affect cognition, or perception-action couplings matter. The authors contend that embodied cognition provides no valuable insight into most classic cognitive science findings and has only trivial connections to those phenomena, nor does it adequately explain basic cognitive experiences.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
October 1, 2024
Yingbing Sun, Ruiyu Zhu, Bernhard Hommel et al.
3 citations
Social exclusion reduces people's sense of agency and ownership over a virtual hand. In a virtual hand illusion experiment, participants who were excluded during a Cyberball game reported weaker feelings of ownership and agency and showed reduced physiological and behavioral measures of these experiences compared to included participants. Synchrony between the virtual hand and the participant's own hand strengthened both ownership and agency across all measures, but this effect was weaker for excluded individuals. The findings indicate that social context shapes fundamental aspects of self-perception.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
December 1, 2015
Donald D Hoffman, Manish Singh, Chetan Prakash
The authors defend their proposal that natural selection favors nonveridical perceptions tuned to fitness, contrary to the textbook view that perception is normally veridical. They thank commentators who offered counterarguments and those who suggested ways to test and develop the idea, responding to each in alphabetical order. The exchange aims to advance scientific understanding of perception and its evolution.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
March 12, 2026
Tian Yuan, Haoyue Ji, Baoyi Zhu et al.
Perception of eye gaze, which can occur outside conscious awareness, is influenced by what is held in working memory (WM). Using continuous flash suppression to render gaze invisible, the study found that suppressed gaze entered conscious awareness faster when its direction matched a face held in WM. This effect did not occur with passive viewing, ruling out simple perceptual priming. WM representations of head orientation also facilitated congruent gaze breakthrough, but WM representations of nonsocial cues like arrows did not. These findings indicate that WM acts as a top-down mechanism enhancing nonconscious gaze perception, suggesting a specialized process for social signals.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
December 1, 2020
Ali Pournaghdali, Bennett L Schwartz
Continuous flash suppression (CFS) is a technique used to study conscious and nonconscious perception, but key questions remain about how it suppresses visual information and what level of visual processing can occur without awareness. This review evaluates how different experimental setups and methods for assessing consciousness affect results in CFS studies. Evidence indicates that low-level visual information can survive suppression and be processed nonconsciously, while high-level visual recognition is completely impaired under CFS. The authors conclude there is no evidence for nonconscious high-level recognition with this technique.