Cognition and Perception Commons^™

Words Have A Weight: Language As A Source Of Inner Grounding And Flexibility In Abstract Concepts, Guy Dove, Laura Barca, Luca Tummolini, Anna M. Borghi

Faculty Scholarship

The role played by language in our cognitive lives is a topic at the centre of contemporary debates in cognitive (neuro)science. In this paper we illustrate and compare two theories that offer embodied explanations of this role: the WAT (Words As social Tools) and the LENS (Language is an Embodied Neuroenhancement and Scaffold) theories. WAT and LENS differ from other current proposals because they connect the impact of the neurologically realized language system on our cognition to the ways in which language shapes our interaction with the physical and social environment. Examining these theories together, their tenets and supporting evidence, …

How To Go Beyond The Body: An Introduction, Guy Dove

Faculty Scholarship

Embodied cognition represents one of most important theoretical developments in contemporary cognitive science. Many cognitive processes appear to be influenced by body morphology, emotions, and sensorimotor systems. This perspective is supported by an ever increasing collection of empirical studies that fall into two broad classes: one consisting of experiments that implicate action, emotion, and perception systems in seemingly abstract cognitive tasks and the other consisting of experiments that demonstrate the contribution of bodily interaction with the external environment to the performance of such tasks.

Now that embodied cognition is fairly well established, the time seems right for assessing its further …

On The Need For Embodied And Dis-Embodied Cognition, Guy Dove

Faculty Scholarship

This essay proposes and defends a pluralistic theory of conceptual embodiment. Our concepts are represented in at least two ways: (i) through sensorimotor simulations of our interactions with objects and events and (ii) through sensorimotor simulations of natural language processing. Linguistic representations are “dis-embodied” in the sense that they are dynamic and multimodal but, in contrast to other forms of embodied cognition, do not inherit semantic content from this embodiment. The capacity to store information in the associations and inferential relationships among linguistic representations extends our cognitive reach and provides an explanation of our ability to abstract and generalize. This …