Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

The Embodied Causal Learner, Vanja Vlajnic

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Traditionally, cognitive psychology has assumed a disembodied learner and thinker. However, an emerging approach known as embodiment posits that seemingly irrelevant motor or perceptual aspects of a task can affect higher-level cognition. The findings from such embodiment studies have also been shown to extend into real-world settings. For example, children who were taught mathematical concepts while required to make gestures consistent with the problem’s solution were more likely, on average, to apply the mathematical concepts correctly in the future (Cook, Mitchell, & Goldin-Meadow, 2008). For this specific study, the area of causal learning was examined.

The primary goal of this …