Introduction to the Special Topic Embodied and Grounded Cognition

Abstract

whether representations of other people's perspective are embodied depends on difficulty.They argue that the degree of symmetry determines whether perspective taking is needed. The Challenges The Challenge To aCCounT for absTraCT ConCepTsMost studies of E and G cognition have focused on concrete objects and actions.People can also represent and reason about abstract concepts that do not have many sensory-motor features, however, and there is not much evidence yet on grounding of abstract concepts in sensory-motor systems (for a review, see Pecher et al., 2011).Thus, critics have argued that current evidence does not fully account for abstract representation.Some authors propose a theoretical solution.van Elk et al. (2010) challenged the reliance on representations and proposed an enactivist approach.They argued that the view of representations as simulations or re-enactment of previous experiences opens two problems.First, the necessity of sensory-motor systems for cognition has been disputed (e.g., Mahon and Caramazza, 2008).Second, it fails to explain concepts beyond our motor repertoire, such as animal actions, or abstract words.The authors proposed that sensory-motor brain areas underlie prediction of actions, arguing in favor of a more procedural view of cognition.In contrast, Dove believed that "the notion of representation is too useful to give up."Dove proposed to use the term dis-embodiment.Language is dis-embodied because its sensory-motor features are unrelated to its meaning.According to Dove (2011), this dual functionality of language is at the basis of generalization and abstraction.Several papers addressed conceptual metaphor theory.Flusberg et al. (2010) presented a computational connectionist model