The Role of the Body in Cognition – Application in Sports and Military Instruction

Abstract

This essay proposes the idea that an individual’s body has an undeniable role in the understanding of the concrete world. Embodied cognition is an approach to cognition that puts emphasis on locomotion, which is one of the most important ways an organism receives sensory signals about the environment. 4E Cognition theory has as a core idea the fact that our mind is not limited only to the brain, and it expands throughout the whole body and also in the environment. This view came as an opposition to Descartes’ ideology that supports the existence of the mind without a body. Furthermore, 4E Cognition critiques traditional cognitive psychology, which is strongly influenced by computationalism, which classifies the mind as an abstract information processor and places minimal importance on the mind’s connection to the outside world. This paper argues that the body is an essential tool that provides information about the exterior world and influences cognition. This idea connects to the way an athlete or a soldier perceives and manages information through the body’s motion, therefore the study explores how bodily experience shapes perception and action by making use of the comprehensive framework provided by the embodied cognition theory, giving representative examples from sport and military contexts.