The Blue Brain Project was a Swiss brain research initiative that aimed to create a digital reconstruction of the mouse brain. The project was founded in May 2005 by the Brain Mind Institute of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
(EPFL) in Switzerland. The project ended in December 2024. Its mission
was to use biologically detailed digital reconstructions and simulations of the mammalian brain to identify the fundamental principles of brain structure and function.
The project was headed by the founding director Henry Markram—who also launched the European Human Brain Project—and was co-directed by Felix Schürmann, Adriana Salvatore and Sean Hill. Using a Blue Genesupercomputer running Michael Hines's NEURON, the simulation involved a biologically realistic model of neurons and an empirically reconstructed model connectome.
In 2006, the project made its first model of a neocortical column with simplified neurons. In November 2007, it completed an initial model of the rat neocortical column.
This marked the end of the first phase, delivering a data-driven
process for creating, validating, and researching the neocortical
column.
Neocortical columns are considered by some researchers to be the smallest functional units of the neocortex, and they are thought to be responsible for higher functions such as conscious thought.
In humans, each column is about 2 mm (0.079 in) in length, has a
diameter of 0.5 mm (0.020 in) and contains about 60,000 neurons. Rat neocortical columns are very similar in structure but contain only 10,000 neurons and 108synapses.
In 2009, Henry Markram claimed that a "detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years". He conceived the Human Brain Project, to which the Blue Brain Project contributed, and which became funded in 2013 by the European Union with up to $1.3 billion.
In 2015, the project simulated part of a rat brain with 30,000 neurons. Also in 2015, scientists at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) developed a quantitative model of the previously unknown relationship between the neurons and the astrocytes.
This model describes the energy management of the brain through the
function of the neuro-glial vascular unit (NGV). The additional layer of
neuron and glial cells is being added to Blue Brain Project models to improve functionality of the system.
In 2017, Blue Brain Project discovered that neural cliques
connected to one another in up to eleven dimensions. The project's
director suggested that the difficulty of understanding the brain is
partly because the mathematics usually applied for studying neural networks cannot detect that many dimensions. The Blue Brain Project was able to model these networks using algebraic topology.
In 2018, Blue Brain Project released its first digital 3D brain cell atlas which, according to ScienceDaily,
is like "going from hand-drawn maps to Google Earth", providing
information about major cell types, numbers, and positions in 737
regions of the brain.
In 2019, Idan Segev, one of the computational neuroscientists
working on the Blue Brain Project, gave a talk titled: "Brain in the
computer: what did I learn from simulating the brain." In his talk, he
mentioned that the whole cortex for the mouse brain was complete and
virtual EEG
experiments would begin soon. He also mentioned that the model had
become too heavy on the supercomputers they were using at the time, and
that they were consequently exploring methods in which every neuron
could be represented as an artificial neural network.
In 2022, scientists at the Blue Brain Project used algebraic
topology to create an algorithm, Topological Neuronal Synthesis, that
generates a large number of unique cells using only a few examples,
synthesizing millions of unique neuronal morphologies. This allows them
to replicate both healthy and diseased states of the brain. In a paper
Kenari et al. were able to digitally synthesize dendritic morphologies
from the mouse brain using this algorithm. They mapped entire brain
regions from just a few reference cells. Since it is open source, this
will enable the modelling of brain diseases and eventually, the
algorithm could lead to digital twins of brains.
Software
The Blue Brain Project has developed a number of software to
reconstruct and to simulate the mouse brain. All software tools
mentioned below are open source software and available for everyone on GitHub.
Blue Brain Nexus
Blue Brain Nexus is a data integration platform which uses a knowledge graph to enable users to search, deposit, and organise data. It stands on the FAIR data principles to provide flexible data management solutions beyond neuroscience studies.
BluePyOpt
BluePyOpt is a tool that is used to build electrical models of single neurons. For this, it uses evolutionary algorithms
to constrain the parameters to experimental electrophysiological data.
Attempts to reconstruct single neurons using BluePyOpt are reported by
Rosanna Migliore, and Stefano Masori.
CoreNEURON
CoreNEURON is a supplemental tool to NEURON, which allows large scale simulation by boosting memory usage and computational speed.
NeuroMorphoVis
NeuroMorphoVis is a visualisation tool for morphologies of neurons.
SONATA
SONATA is a joint effort between Blue Brain Project and Allen Institute for Brain Science,
to develop a standard for data format, which realises a multiple
platform working environment with greater computational memory and
efficiency.
Funding
The project was funded primarily by the Swiss government and the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Flagship grant from the European Commission, and secondarily by grants and donations from private individuals. The
EPFL bought the Blue Gene computer at a reduced cost because it was
still a prototype and IBM was interested in exploring how applications
would perform on the machine. BBP was viewed as a validation of the Blue Gene supercomputer concept.
Related projects
Cajal Blue Brain
Cajal Blue Brain used the Magerit supercomputer (CeSViMa)
Noah Hutton created the documentary film In Silico over a 10-year period. The film was released in April 2021. The film covers the "shifting goals and landmarks" of the Blue Brain Project as well as the drama, "In the end, this isn't
about science. It's about the universals of power, greed, ego, and
fame."
Embodied cognition represents a diverse group of theories which investigate how cognition is shaped by the bodily state and capacities of the organism. These embodied factors include the motor system, the perceptual system, bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness),
and the assumptions about the world that shape the functional structure
of the brain and body of the organism. Embodied cognition suggests that
these elements are essential to a wide spectrum of cognitive functions,
such as perception biases, memory recall, comprehension and high-level
mental constructs (such as meaning attribution and categories) and performance on various cognitive tasks (reasoning or judgment).
The classical Cartesian model of the mind under which body, world, perception and action are understood as independent
Proponents of the embodied cognition thesis emphasize the active and significant role the body plays in the shaping of cognition and in the understanding of an agent's mind and cognitive capacities. In philosophy, embodied cognition holds that an agent's cognition, rather than being the product of mere (innate) abstract representations of the world, is strongly influenced by aspects of an agent's body beyond the brain itself. An embodied model of cognition opposes the disembodied Cartesian model,
according to which all mental phenomena are non-physical and,
therefore, not influenced by the body. With this opposition the
embodiment thesis intends to reintroduce an agent's bodily experiences
into any account of cognition. It is a rather broad thesis and
encompasses both weak and strong variants of embodiment. In an attempt to reconcile cognitive science with human experience, the enactive approach to cognition defines "embodiment" as follows:
By using the term embodied
we mean to highlight two points: first that cognition depends upon the
kinds of experience that come from having a body with various
sensorimotor capacities, and second, that these individual sensorimotor
capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological,
psychological and cultural context.
This double sense attributed to the embodiment thesis emphasizes the
many aspects of cognition that researchers in different fields—such as
philosophy, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, psychology, and
neuroscience—are involved with. This general characterization of
embodiment faces some difficulties: a consequence of this emphasis on
the body, experience, culture, context, and the cognitive mechanisms of
an agent in the world is that often distinct views and approaches to
embodied cognition overlap. The theses of extended cognition and situated cognition,
for example, are usually intertwined and not always carefully
separated. And since each of the aspects of the embodiment thesis is
endorsed to different degrees, embodied cognition should be better seen
"as a research program rather than a well-defined unified theory".
Some authors explain the embodiment thesis by arguing that
cognition depends on an agent's body and its interactions with a
determined environment. From this perspective, cognition in real
biological systems is not an end in itself; it is constrained by the
system's goals and capacities. Such constraints do not mean cognition is
set by adaptive behavior (or autopoiesis) alone, but instead that cognition requires "some
kind of information processing... the transformation or communication
of incoming information". The acquiring of such information involves the
agent's "exploration and modification of the environment".
It would be a mistake, however, to
suppose that cognition consists simply of building maximally accurate
representations of input information...the gaining of knowledge is a
stepping stone to achieving the more immediate goal of guiding behavior
in response to the system's changing surroundings.
— Marcin Miłkowski, Explaining the Computational Mind, p. 4.
The embodied cognitive model of the mind under which body, world, perception and action are dynamically related with each other
Another approach to understanding embodied cognition comes from a
narrower characterization of the embodiment thesis. The following
narrower view of embodiment avoids any compromises to external sources
other than the body and allows differentiating between embodied
cognition, extended cognition, and situated cognition. Thus, the embodiment thesis can be specified as follows:
Many features of cognition are
embodied in that they are deeply dependent upon characteristics of the
physical body of an agent, such that the agent's beyond-the-brain body
plays a significant causal role, or a physically constitutive role, in
that agent's cognitive processing.
— RA Wilson and L Foglia, Embodied Cognition in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
This thesis points out the core idea that an agent's body plays a
significant role in shaping different features of cognition, such as
perception, attention, memory, reasoning—among others. Likewise, these
features of cognition depend on the kind of body an agent has. The
thesis omits direct mention of some aspects of the "more encompassing
biological, psychological and cultural context" included in the enactive
definition, making it possible to separate embodied cognition, extended
cognition, and situated cognition.
In contrast to the embodiment thesis, the extended mind thesis limits cognitive processing neither to the brain nor even to the body, it extends it outward into the agent's world. Situated cognition
emphasizes that this extension is not just a matter of including
resources outside the head but stressing the role of probing and
changing interactions with the agent's world. Cognition is situated in that it is inherently dependent upon the cultural and social contexts within which it takes place.
This conceptual reframing of cognition as an activity influenced
by the body has had significant implications. For instance, the view of
cognition inherited by most contemporary cognitive neuroscience is
internalist in nature. An agent's behavior along with its capacity to
maintain (accurate) representations of the surrounding environment were
considered as the product of "powerful brains that can maintain the
world models and devise plans". From this perspective, cognizing was conceived as something that an
isolated brain did. In contrast, accepting the role the body plays
during cognitive processes allows us to account for a more encompassing
view of cognition. This shift in perspective within neuroscience
suggests that successful behavior in real-world scenarios demands the
integration of several sensorimotor and cognitive (as well as affective)
capacities of an agent. Thus, cognition emerges in the relationship
between an agent and the affordances provided by the environment rather than in the brain alone.
In 2002, a collection of positive characterizations summarizing
what the embodiment thesis entails for cognition were offered. Professor
of Cognitive Psychology Margaret Wilson argues that the general outlook
of embodied cognition "displays an interesting co-variation of multiple
observations and houses a number of different claims: (1) cognition is
situated; (2) cognition is time-pressured; (3) we off-load cognitive
work onto the environment; (4) the environment is part of the cognitive
system; (5) cognition is for action; (6) offline cognition is
bodily-based". According to Wilson, the first three and the fifth claim appear to be
at least partially true, while the fourth claim is deeply problematic in
that all things that have an impact on the elements of a system are not
necessarily considered part of the system. The sixth claim has received the least attention in the literature on
embodied cognition, yet it might be the most significant of the six
claims as it shows how certain human cognitive capabilities, that
previously were thought to be highly abstract, now appear to be leaning
towards an embodied approach for their explanation. Wilson also describes at least five main (abstract) categories that
combine both sensory and motor skills (or sensorimotor functions). The
first three are working memory, episodic memory, and implicit memory; the fourth is mental imagery, and finally, the fifth concerns reasoning and problem solving.
History
A
timeline graph reconstructing historically relevant developments and
key contributions that influenced the growth of embodied cognition. To
the left are the years in descending order. The legend on the top-right
corner indicates how to interpret the connections made.
The theory of embodied cognition, along with the multiple aspects it
comprises, can be regarded as the imminent result of an intellectual skepticism towards the flourishment of the disembodied theory of mind put forth by René Descartes in the 17th century. According to Cartesian dualism,
the mind is entirely distinct from the body and can be successfully
explained and understood without reference to the body or to its
processes.
Research has been done to identify the set of ideas that would
establish what could be considered as the early stages of embodied
cognition around inquiries regarding the mind-body-soul relation and vitalism in the German tradition from 1740 to 1920. The modern approach and definition of embodied cognition has a relatively short history. Intellectual underpinnings of embodied cognition can be traced back to the influence of philosophy and, more specifically, the phenomenological tradition, psychology, and connectionism in the 20th century.
Phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
served as a source of inspiration for what would later be known as the
embodiment thesis. They stood up against the mechanistic and disembodied
approach to the explanation of the mind by emphasizing the fact that
there are aspects of human experiences (consciousness, cognition) that
cannot simply be explained by a model of the mind as computation of
inner symbols. From a phenomenological standpoint, such aspects remain
unaccountable if, as in Cartesian dualism, they are not "deeply rooted
in the physical nuts-and-bolts of the interacting agent". Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception, for example, rejects the Cartesian idea that people's primary mode of being in the world is thinking and proposes corporeity,
that is, the body itself as the primary site for knowing the world, and
perception as the medium and the pre-reflective foundation of
experience.
The body is the
vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living
creature, to be intervolved in a definite environment, to identify
oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them.
So stated, the body is the primary condition for experience since it
comprises a collection of active meanings about the world and its
objects. The body also provides the first-person perspective (a point of
view) with which one experiences the world and opens up multiple
possibilities for being.
Evidence from experiments and observations in research of how behaviour is constructed conducted in the 1920-30s by Nikolai Bernstein also brought his attention to the role of the body in cognition. Bernstein gave extensive example of how people change their own posture
during perception of someone doing intense physical tasks.
The appreciation of the phenomenological mindset allows us to not
overlook the influence that phenomenology's speculative but systematic
reflection on the mind-body-world relation had in the growth and
development of the core ideas which embodied cognition comprises. From a
phenomenological perspective "all cognition is embodied, interactive,
and embedded in dynamically changing environments". These constitute the set of beliefs which proponents of embodied cognition such as cognitive scientists Francisco Varela, Eleonor Rosch, and Evan Thompson will revise later on and seek to reintroduce in the scientific study of cognition under the name of enaction. Enactivism
reclaims the importance of considering the biodynamics of the living
organism to understand cognition by gathering ideas from fields such as biology, psychoanalysis, Buddhism, and phenomenology.
According to this enactive approach, organisms obtain knowledge or
develop their cognitive capacities through a perception–action
relationship with a mutually determining environment.
This basic idea of (qualitative) experience as the product of an
individual's active perception–action interactions with its surrounding
is also traceable to the American contextualist or pragmatist tradition in works such as Art As Experience by American psychologist John Dewey.
For Dewey, experiences affect people's personal lives as they are the
by-product of continuous and commutative interactions of a biological
and organic self (an incarnated body) with the world. These lived
(corporeal) experiences should serve as the foundation to build upon.
On the bases of empirical grounds, and in opposition to those
philosophical traditions that belittled the importance of the body to
understand cognition, research on embodiment have demonstrated the
relationship between cognition and bodily process. Thus, understanding
cognition requires one to consider and investigate the sensory and motor
mechanism that enables it. Cognitive scientist George Lakoff,
for example, holds that reasoning and language arise from the nature of
bodily experiences and, thus, even people's own metaphors have bodily
references. Peter Putnam and Robert W. Fuller advanced a version of the computational theory of mind, perceptual control theory and neuroplasticity wherein rules become fixed in the brain's structure based on trial and error and motor neuron feedback loops.
Since the 1950s, encouraged by progress in informatics,
researchers began to create digital models of the processes by which
sensory input is selected by the brain, stored in the memory, connected
to existing knowledge and used for elaboration.[25]
These traditional computationalists views of cognition that were
typical in the 1950s–1980s are now considered implausible because there
is no continuity with the cognitive skills that would have been demanded
and developed by the ancestors of the human species. The earlier version of the concept of embodiment in cognition was
offered in 1997-1999 by Irina Trofimova who called the experimentally
proven effects of embodiment in meaning attribution as "projection
through capacities". Some researchers indeed argue that this algorithmic focus on mental
activities ignores the fact that human beings engage with evolutionary
pressures using their entire bodies.Margaret Wilson considers the embodied cognition perspective as
fundamentally an evolutionary one, viewing cognition as a set of
abilities that built upon, and still reflects, the structure of physical
bodies and how human brains evolved to manage those bodies. The theory of evolution emphasises that thanks to their bipedal gait,
early humans did not need their 'forepaws' for locomotion, facilitating
them to manipulate the environment with the aid of tools. One researcher
goes even further, positing that the multiple opportunities provided by
human hands shape people's concepts of the mind. One example is that people often conceive cognitive processes in manual terms, such as 'grasping an idea'.
J.J. Gibson
(1904–1979) developed his theory on ecological psychology that entirely
contradicted the computationalist idea of understanding the mind as
information processing which by that time had permeated psychology—both
in theory and practice. Gibson particularly disagreed with the way his
contemporaries understood the nature of perception. Computationalist
perspectives, for example, consider perceptual objects as an unreliable
source of information upon which the mind must do some sort of
inference. Gibson viewed perceptual processes as the product of the
relation between a moving agent and its relationship with a specific
environment. Similarly, Varela and colleagues argue that both cognition and the
environment are not pre-given; instead, they are enacted or brought
forth by the agent's history of sensorimotor and structurally coupled
activities.
Connectionism
also put forth a critique of computationalist commitments, while
granting the possibility that some sort of non-symbolic computational
processes might take place. According to the connectionist thesis, cognition as a biological
phenomenon can be explained and understood through the interaction and
dynamics of artificial neural networks (ANNs). Given the traces of abstraction that remain in the inputs and outputs
through which connectionist neural networks carry computations,
connectionism is said to be not so far from computationalism and unable
to cope with both the challenge of dealing with the details involved
during perceiving and acting and explaining higher level cognition. Likewise, connectionism's take on cognition is biologically inspired by the behavior and interaction of single neurons,
yet its connections to the embodiment thesis in general, and to
perception–action interactions in particular, are not clearly outlined
or straightforward.
By early 2000, O'Regan, J. K. and Noë, A.
provided empirical evidence against the computationalist mindset
arguing that although cortical maps exist in the brain and their
patterns of activation give rise to perceptual experiences, they alone
are unable to fully explain the subjective character of experience.
Namely, it is unclear how internal representations generate conscious
perception. Given this ambiguity, O'Regan, J. K. and Nöe, A. put forth
what would later be known as "sensorimotor contingencies" (SMCs) in an attempt to understand the changing character of sensations as actors act in the world. According to the SMC theory,
The experience of seeing occurs when the organism masters what we call the governing laws of sensorimotor contingency.
Ever since the late 20th century and recognizing the significant role
the body plays for cognition, the embodied cognition theory has gained
(an ever increasing) popularity, it has been the subject of multiple
articles in different research areas, and the mainstream approach to
what Shapiro and Spaulding call the "embodied make-over". A consequence of this widespread acceptance of the embodiment thesis is
the emergence of 4E features of cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted,
and extended cognition). Under 4E cognition it is no longer thought of as being instantiated in or by a single organism, rather:
It
assumes that cognition is shaped and structured by dynamic interactions
between the brain, body, and both the physical and social environments.
Scope
The scope of embodied cognition and the intertwined relationship that arise between the sciences
Embodied cognition argues that several factors both internal and
external (such as the body and the environment) play a role in the
development of an agent's cognitive capacities, just as mental
constructs (such as thoughts and desires) are said to influence an
agent's bodily actions. For this reason, embodied cognition is
considered as a wide-ranging research program, rather than a
well-defined and unified theory. A scientific approach to embodied cognition reaches, inspires, and
brings together ideas from several research areas, each with its own
take on embodiment yet in a joint effort to (methodically) investigate
embodied cognition.
Research on embodied cognition comprises a variety of fields
within the sciences such as linguistics, neuroscience, (cognitive)
psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, robotics, etc. For this
reason, contemporary developments on embodied cognition can be regarded
as the embodied make-over of cognitive science offering new ways to
look at the nature, structure, and mechanisms of cognition. Embodying cognition requires the different features of cognition such
as perception, language, memory, learning, reasoning, emotion,
self-regulation, and its social aspects to be revisited and investigated
through the lens of embodiment in order to ground its theoretical and
methodological underpinnings.
Embodied cognition has gained the attention and interest of classical cognitive science (along with all sciences it comprises) to incorporate embodiment ideas into its research. In linguistics, George Lakoff (a cognitive scientist and linguist) and his collaborators Mark Johnson, Mark Turner, and Rafael E. Núñez have promoted and expanded the embodiment thesis based on developments within the field of cognitive science. Their research has provided evidence suggesting that people use their
understanding of familiar physical objects, actions, and situations to
understand other domains. All cognition is based on the knowledge that
comes from the body and other disciplines are mapped onto humans'
embodied knowledge using a combination of conceptual metaphor, image schema and prototypes.
The conceptual metaphors research have argued that people use metaphors all over to be in charge of the conceptual level; in other words, they map one
conceptual state into another one. Therefore, research has stated that
there is a single metaphor behind various definitions. Several examples
of conceptual metaphors from different fields were collected to explain
how metaphors relate to other metaphors and often refer to body aspects. The most common example given to this explanation is when people
describe the concept of love, associating this love metaphor with
physically embodied journey experiences. Another example of the language
and embodiment of Lakoff and Mark Turner is visual metaphors.
Accordingly, they argue that the positioning of these visual metaphors
for upright and forward-moving creatures depends on body type and the
characteristics of the body's interaction with the environment.
Another study from 2000 focused on the "image schema" to investigate how people understand abstract concepts. Accordingly, abstract concepts are understood by considering basic
physical situations. Abstract concepts, whose basic physical states are
considered, are then interpreted by using sensory-motor and perceptual
skills. Thus, it is shown that there is a spatial reasoning process that
requires using the body even in reasoning over abstract concepts. In
this context, the image schema is seen as a conceptual metaphor form.
For example, spatial reasoning skills and the visual cortex tend to be
used to understand a mathematical concept consisting of imaginary
numbers that are purely abstract. Thus, it has been shown how important the body plays in the image
schema as in the conceptual metaphor in the interpretation of concepts.
Another important factor in understanding linguistic categories is prototypes. Eleanor Rosch
argued that prototypes play an important role in people's cognition.
According to her research, prototypes are the most typical members of a
category, and she explains this with an example from birds. The robin,
for example, is a prototypical bird while the penguin is not a
prototypical bird which shows that objects that are prototypical are
more easily categorized, and therefore, people can find answers by
reasoning about the categories they encounter through these prototypes. Another study identified basic level categories that exemplify this situation in a more structured way. Accordingly, basic level categories
are categories that can be associated with basic physical motions; they
are made up of prototypes that can be easily visualized. These
prototypes are used for reasoning about general categories. On the other hand, Lakoff emphasizes that what is important in
prototype theory, rather than class or type characteristics, is that the
feature of the categories people use is a bodily experience. Thus, as seen in the general of these approaches, it can be said that
the most basic feature in understanding and interpreting linguistic
concepts and categories is whether the concept or category has been
experienced bodily.
The concept of embodiment has been inspired by research in cognitive neuroscience, such as the proposals of Gerald Edelman concerning how mathematical and computational models such as neuronal group selection
and neural degeneracy result in emergent categorization. From a
neuroscientific perspective, the embodied cognition theory examines the
interaction of sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective neurological
systems. The embodied mind thesis is compatible with some views of
cognition promoted in neuropsychology, such as the theories of consciousness of Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, Gerald Edelman, and Antonio Damasio.
It is also supported by a broad and ever-increasing collection of
empirical studies within neuroscience. By examining brain activity with
neuroimaging techniques, researchers have found indications of
embodiment. In an Electroencephalography (EEG) study researchers showed that in line with the embodied cognition, sensorimotor contingency and common coding theses, sensory and motor processes in the brain are not sequentially separated, they are strongly coupled. Considering the interaction of the sensorimotor and cognitive system, a
study from 2005 stresses how crucial sensorimotor cortices are for
semantic comprehension of body–action terms and sentences. A functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) study from 2004 showed that passively read action words, such as
lick, pick or kick, led to a somatotopic neuronal activity in or
adjacent to brain regions associated with actual movement of the
respective body parts. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation
(TMS), a study in 2005 stated that the activity of the motor system is
coupled to auditory action-related sentences. When the participants
listened to hand–or foot-related sentences, the motor evoked potentials (MEPs) recorded from the hand and foot muscles were reduced. These two exemplary studies indicate a relationship between cognitively
understanding words referring to sensorimotor concepts and activation
of sensorimotor cortices. Along the lines of embodiment, neuroimaging
techniques serve to show interactions of the sensory and motor system.
Next to neuroimaging studies, behavioral studies also provides
evidence supporting the embodied cognition theory. Abstract higher
cognitive concepts such as the "importance" of an object or an issue
also seem to stand in relation to the sensorimotor system. People
estimate objects to be heavier when they are told that they are
important or hold important information in contrast to unimportant
information. Similarly, weight affects the way people invest physical and cognitive
effort when dealing with concrete or abstract issues. For example, more
importance is assigned to decision–making procedures when holding
heavier clipboards. What this suggest is that the physical effort invested in concrete
objects leads to more cognitive effort when dealing with abstract
concepts.
The work of cognitive neuroscientists such as Francisco Varela and Walter Freeman seeks to explain embodied and situated cognition in terms of dynamical systems theory and neurophenomenology, rejecting the idea that the brain merely uses representations to cognise (a position also espoused by Gerhard Werner).
There are several neuroscientific approaches to explain cognition from
an embodied perspective as well as multiple methods such as neuroimaging
techniques, behavioral experiments, and dynamical models that can be
employed to support and further investigate embodied cognition.
In the light of these, a body is essential for cognition and,
therefore, for intelligent behavior since the interaction between the
body and the environment is fundamental for developing cognitive
abilities. This type of knowledge is grounded in physical embodiment–the
relationship humans have with their bodies. It is the concept of "the
idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body
influences the mind". Embodied artificial intelligence and robotics is a method of applying this principle to artificial systems.
The applications of embodied cognition and artificial intelligence
Traditional artificial intelligence involves a computational
approach. This primary computational paradigm evolved to the embodied
perspective with embodied cognition studies and brought more
interdisciplinary research topics to artificial intelligence. Embodied
perspective brings a necessity of working with the physical world and
systems which came alongside robotics. Robotics are essential for the
embodied artificial perspective due to their differing capabilities from
computers; computers define the inputs; robots can interact with the
physical world via their own body. Researchers working on embodied AI are moving away from an
algorithm-driven approach to robots interacting with the physical world. Embodied Artificial intelligence tries to figure out how biological
systems work first, then construct basic rules of intelligent behavior,
and finally apply that knowledge to create artificial systems, robots,
or intelligent devices. Embodied artificial intelligence has a large scale of applications and
research. For instance, the embodied artificial approach can be seen in
micro- and nano-mechatronic systems and evolvable hardware, top-down
bio-synthetic systems research, bottom-up chemo-synthetic systems, and
biochemical systems. The majority of embodied artificial intelligence focuses on robot
training and autonomous vehicle technologies. Autonomous vehicles have a
significant interest in embodied artificial intelligence applications
because this technology allows driving and making possible judgments
based on what they see as humans do.
Perception
Example of the "change blindness"
illusion. These two alternating images contain several differences that
most people struggle to find right away. It emphasizes the fact that
perception is active and demands attention.
Traditional neuropsychological research widely acknowledged that when an internal representation
of the outside world is activated somewhere in the brain, it leads to a
perceptual experience. Embodied cognition challenges this claim by
stating that the existence of cortical maps in the brain fails to explain and account for the subjective character of people's perceptual experiences. For example, they cannot sufficiently explain the apparent stability of the visual world despite eye movements, the filling-in of the blind spot, or visual illusions such as "change blindness" which reveal apparent imperfections in the visual system. From an embodied cognition perspective, perception is not a passive
reception of (incomplete) sensory inputs for which the brain must
compensate to provide us with a coherent picture. The brain interprets
the outside world based on an individual's intentions, memories, and
emotions, as well as the environment and the specific situation the
individual is in. Perception involves more complex processes than simply
receiving inputs (or visual stimuli) from the external world to output
actions in response to them. Perception is an active process conducted
by a perceiving agent (a perceiver); it entails an engaged perceiver and is influenced by the agent's
experiences and intentions, its bodily states, and the interaction
between the agent's body and the environment around it.
One example of such active interaction between perception and the
body is the case that distance perception can be influenced by bodily
states. The way people view the outside world can differ depending on
the physical resources that individuals have such as fitness, age, or
glucose levels. For instance, in one study, people with chronic pain who
are less capable of moving around perceived given distances as further
than healthy people did. Another study shows that intended actions can affect processing in visual search, with more orientation errors for pointing than for grasping. Because orientation is important when grasping an object, the plan to
grasp an object is thought to improve orientation accuracy. This shows how actions, the body's interaction with the environment,
can contribute to the visual processing of task-relevant information.
Perception also influences the perspective individuals to take on
a particular situation and the type of judgments they make. For
instance, researchers have shown that people will significantly more
likely take the perspective of another person (e.g., a person in a picture) instead of their own when making judgements about objects in a photograph. This means that the presence of people (as compared to only objects) in
a visual scene affects the perspective a viewer takes when making
judgements on, for example, relations between objects in the scene. Some
researchers state that these results suggest a "disembodied" cognition
given the fact that people take the perspective of others instead of
their own and make judgments accordingly.
Embodied cognition views on language describes how when humans
comprehend words, sensorimotor areas are involved in interacting with
the objects and entities the words refer to. First experimental studies of the impact of body's sex, age and
constitution (temperament) on language perception and use emerged in
1995-99 and expanded from 2010s. The embodiment effect initially was called "projection through
capacities" and emerged as a tendency of people attribute meaning to
common adjectives and abstract and neutral nouns depending on their
endurance, tempo, plasticity, emotionality, sex or age. For example, in these studies males with stronger motor-physical
endurance estimated abstractions describing people-, work/reality- and
time-related concepts in more positive terms than males with a weaker
endurance. Females with stronger social or physical endurance estimated
social attractors in more positive terms than weaker females. Both male
and female temperament groups with higher sociability showed a universal
positive bias in their estimations of social concepts, in comparison to
participants with lower sociability.
Over the last years, behavioral and neural evidence has shown
that the process of language comprehension activates motor simulations and involves motor systems. Some researchers have investigated mirror neurons
to illustrate the link between the mirror neuron systems and language
suggesting that some aspects of language (such as part of semantics and
phonology) can be embodied in the sensorimotor system represented by
mirror neurons.
It is well known that language has a multi-component structure,
one of which is language comprehension. Research on embodied cognition
shows that language comprehension involves the motor system. In addition, various studies explain that understanding linguistic
explanations of actions is based on a simulation of the action
described. These action simulations also include evaluation of the motor system. A study in which university students evaluated language comprehension
and motor system with a pendulum swinging task while performing a
"sentence judgment task" found significant changes in functions
containing performable sentences.
Another study used the mirror neurons perspective to illustrate
the relationship between the motor system and several language
components. Because mirror neurons are one of the essential parts of the
motor system, researchers compared monkeys and humans in an anatomical
framework; specifically, they made the comparison with respect to
Broca's area. Another study concerning the role of mirror neurons during learning via
language usage stated that activations occurred in Broca's area even
when participants watched other people's conversations without hearing
the sounds. An fMRI study examining the relationship of mirror neurons in humans
with linguistic materials has shown that there are activations in the
premotor cortex and Broca's area when reading or listening to sentences
associated with actions. According to these findings, researchers state that there is a
connection between the motor system and language. They also argue that
the motor system together with mirror neurons mechanisms can process
certain aspects of language.
As of 2014, literature mainly focuses on the relation between
language and embodied cognition on a motor system, more precisely by
mirror neuron explanations. This relationship also extends to cognitive
capabilities which involve a variety of language components. Studies
have examined how embodied and extended cognition can help to
reconceptualize and ground second language acquisition. The nature of language acquisition extends cognitive capability itself
due to the fact that it has multiple components which have embodied
representations associated with language processing and provide a ground
concept for language.
Memory
The body has an essential role in shaping the mind. So, the mind must
be understood in the context of its relationship with a physical body
that interacts in the world. These interactions can also be cognitive
activities in everyday life, such as driving, chatting, and imagining
the placement of items in a room. These cognitive activities are limited
by memory capacity. The relationships between memory
and embodied cognition have been demonstrated in studies in different
fields and through various tasks. In general, studies on embodied
cognition and memory investigate how manipulations on the body cause
changes in memory performance, or vice versa, manipulations through
memory tasks subsequently lead to bodily changes. Researchers have drawn attention to the relationship between memory and
action from an embodied cognition approach where memory is defined as
integrated patterns of actions limited by the body. On the one hand, embodied cognition sees action preparation as a
fundamental function of cognition. On the other hand, memory plays a
role in tasks that do not occur in the present but involve remembering
actions and information from the past and imagining events that may or
may not happen in the future. Glenberg blurs this apparent dichotomy by
arguing that there is a reciprocal relationship between memory, action,
and perception. Accordingly, manipulations that can take place in the
body or movement can lead to changes in memory.
Researchers have also investigated the influence of body position
on ease of recall in an autobiographical memory study to examine the
effect of embodied cognition on memory performance. Participants were asked to take positions compatible or incompatible
with their original body position of the remembered event during a
recall event. Researchers found out that participants given compatible
body positions compared to incompatible body positions showed faster
responses in recalling memories during the experiment. Thus, they
concluded that body position facilitates access to autobiographical
memories. The relationship between memory and body has also emphasised that
memory systems depend on the body's experiences with the world. This is
particularly evident in episodic memory because this type of memories in
the episodic memory system are defined by their content and are
remembered as experienced by the person who is remembering. Research has also investigated the relationship between embodiment and
memory by recalling collective and personal memories indicating how
embodiment enriches the understanding of memory. Embodied memory research through the recalling of personal traumas and
violent memories has reported that people who have experienced trauma or
violence re-feel their experiences in their narratives throughout their
lives. In addition, memories that threaten a person's life by directly
affecting the body, such as injury and physical violence, recreate
similar reactions again in the body while remembering the event. For
example, people can report feeling smells, sounds, and movements when
remembering childhood trauma memories. A proper evaluation of those
memories and the corresponding physical and physiological phenomena
associated with them could describe how those set of recalled memories
are embodied.
New perspectives on the neural structure and memory processes
underlying embodied cognition, episodic memory, recall, and recognition
have also been explored.As experiences are received, neural states are reenacted in action,
perception, and introspection systems. Perception includes sensory
modalities; motor modalities include movement; and introspection
includes emotional, mental, and motivational states. All of these
modalities altogether constitute different aspects that shape
experiences. Therefore, cognitive processes applied to memory support
the action that is appropriate for a particular situation, not by
remembering what the situation is, but by remembering the relationship
of the action to that situation. For example, remembering and identifying the party one attended the
previous day is said to be related to the body because the sensory-motor
aspects of the event that is being recalled (i.e., the party), along
with the details of what happened, are being reconstructed.
Learning
Research on embodied cognition and learning suggests that learning
could occur and be triggered by perception-action interactions of the
body with the surrounding environment. An embodied cognitive approach to
child development provides insights into how infants attain spatial
knowledge and develop spatial skills that allow them to (successfully)
interact with the world around them. Most infants learn to walk in the first 18 months of life, which draws
on ample new opportunities for exploring things around them. In this
exploration, infants learn spatial relations, and by carrying objects
from one place to another, they may also learn affordances such as
"transportability". Thereafter, new phases in exploration may occur through which infants can discover other even more elaborate affordances. According to Eleanor Gibson, exploration takes an essential place in
cognitive development. For example, infants explore whatever is in their
vicinity by seeing, mouthing, or touching it before learning to reach
objects nearby. Then, infants learn to crawl, which enables them to seek
out objects beyond reaching distance, learn basic spatial relations
between themselves, objects, and others, and get an understanding of
depth and distance. This development of motor skills through the exploration of the
physical and social world seems to play a central role in visual-spatial
cognition.
Embodied perception-action experience may serve as a tool for
learning that extends across the life span, from infancy to adulthood. Research on the role of action in early as well as educational learning
contexts demonstrates the importance of embodiment for learning. In one
experiment, three-month-old infants who were not skilled in reaching
were trained to reach for objects with velcro-covered mittens instead.
Afterward, the assessments and comparison with the control group showed
that infants can rapidly form goal-based action representations and view
others' actions as goal-directed. Further research indicates that mere observational experience by infants does not produce these results. Similarly, research has shown how action and bodily movements can be used as scaffolds
for learning. A study investigating whether infants at high risk for
developing autism spectrum disorders (ASD) could benefit from action
scaffolded interventions (reaching experiences) during early development
indicates an increase in grasping activity following training. And
thus, it provides evidence about the possibility for high-risk of ASD
infants to learn and respond to action-based treatment interventions. Another study investigates how teaching methods can benefit from
embodiment and proposes that a professor's movements and gestures
contribute to learning by growing students' embodied experiences in the
classroom, leading to an increased capacity to recall.
The action-based language theory (ABL) states that aspects of
embodiment are also relevant for language learning and acquisition. ABL
proposes that the brain exploits the same mechanisms used in motor
control for language learning. When adults, for example, call attention
to an object and an infant follows the lead and attends to said object,
canonical neurons are activated and affordances
of an object become available to the infant. Simultaneously, hearing
the articulation of the object's name leads to the activation of speech
mirror mechanisms in infants. This chain of events allows for Hebbian learning of the meaning of verbal labels by linking the speech and action controllers, which get activated in this scenario.
The role of gestures in learning is another example of the
importance of embodiment for cognition. Gestures can aid, facilitate and
enhance learning performance, or compromise it when the gestures are restricted or meaningless to the content that is being transmitted. In a study using the Tower of Hanoi (TOH)
puzzle, participants were divided into two groups. In the first part of
the experiment, the smallest disks used in TOH were the lightest and
could be moved using just one hand. For the second part, this was
reversed for one group (switch group) so that the smallest disks were
the heaviest, and participants needed both hands to move them. The disks
remained the same for the other group (no-switch group). After the
experiment ended, participants were asked to explain their solution
while researchers monitored their gestures when describing their
solution. The results showed that using gestures affected the
performance of the switch group in the second part of the experiment.
The more they used one-handed gestures to depict their solution in the
first part of the experiment, the worse they performed in the second
part.
A study investigating the role of gestures in second language
learning states that learning the vocabulary with self-performed
gestures increases learning outcomes. The enduring benefits continued
even after two and six months post-learning. In addition, the same study
also investigated the neural correlates of learning a second language
with gestures. The results indicate that left premotor areas and the superior temporal sulcus (a brain region responsible for visual processing of biological motion) were activated during learning with gestures. Similarly, an fMRI
study showed that children who learned to solve mathematical problems
using a speech and gesture strategy were more likely to have activation
in motor regions of the brain. The activation of motor regions occurred
during scans in which children were not using gestures to solve the
problems. These findings indicate that learning with gestures creates a
neural trace of the motor system that goes beyond the learning phase and
activates when children engage with problems they learned to solve with
gestures.
Embodied cognition has also been linked to both reading and
writing. Research shows that physical and perceptual engagements
congruent with the content of the reading material can boost reading
comprehension. Findings also suggest that the benefits accrued from
handwriting as compared to typing in letter recognition and written
communication result from the more embodied nature of handwriting.
Reasoning
Experiments investigating the relation between motor processes and
high-level reasoning have suggested that bodily action and sensorimotor
experience are linked to various aspects of reasoning. A study indicated
that even though most individuals recruit visual processes when
presented with spatial problems such as mental rotation tasks, motor experts (such as wrestlers) favor motor processes over visual
encoding to manipulate the objects mentally, showing higher overall
performance. Results indicate that motor experts' performance drops once
the (hand) movement is inhibited. A related study showed that motor experts use similar processes for the
mental rotation of body parts and polygons, whereas non-experts treated
these stimuli differently. These results were not due to underlying confounds, as demonstrated by a
training study that showed mental rotation improvements after a
one-year motor training compared with controls. Similar patterns were also found in working memory tasks, with the
ability to remember movements being significantly disrupted by a
secondary verbal task in controls and by a motor task in motor experts,
suggesting the involvement of different mechanisms to encode movements
based on either verbal or on motor processes.
Demonstration of dynamic depictive gestures for the Triangle conjecture
The role of motor experience in reasoning has also been investigated
through gestures. The Gesture as Simulated Action theory (GSA) provides a
framework for understanding how gestures manifest their connection. According to GSA, gestures result from the embodied simulation of
actions and sensorimotor states. Consequently, gesturing while
expressing or reasoning ideas shows that embodied processes are involved
in producing them. More significantly, gesturing heightens focus and
increases activation of motor and perceptual information. Gestures are
said to have a casual role in reasoning as gesturing leads to increased
motor and perceptual information flow during the reasoning process. This
does not necessarily translate into more effective reasoning, as such
information is sometimes irrelevant for a specific problem. The effects of gestures on reasoning are not limited only to speakers;
they convey information that also affects listeners' reasoning. For
example, listeners could produce similar simulations to those of the
speaker by attending to the speaker's gestures.
More evidence for the embodied role of gestures during reasoning
comes from studies on mathematical and geometric reasoning. Studies
indicate that gestures and, more particularly, dynamic depictive
gestures (i.e., gestures used to represent and show the transformation
of objects) are linked to better performance in snap judgment
(intuition), insight, and mathematical reasoning for proof. Additionally, the use of dynamic depictive gestures are associated with
better mathematical reasoning, and thus, directing learners to use such
gestures facilitates justification and proof activities.
Embodied cognition theory has been applied in behavioral law and
economics theory to enlighten reasoning and decision-making processes
involving risk and time, decisions, and judgment. Research has shown
that the idea that mental processes are grounded in bodily states is not
being captured in the standard view of human rationality and the link
between them could be useful for understanding and predicting human
actions that seem irrational. The concept of "embodied rationality"
results from expanding such ideas into law and highlights how findings
stemming from embodied cognition offer a more encompassing insight into
human behavior and rationality.
Emotion
Response
times for the positive, negative, and neutral valence conditions in the
approach and avoidance experiment. Participants were significantly
faster for the "positive toward" condition regardless of the central
word's valence.
Embodied cognition theories have provided rigorous accounts of emotion and the processing of information about emotion. In this respect, experiencing and re-experiencing an emotion involve
overlapping mental processes. Research has shown that one re-experiences
emotion through the interconnections of the neurons that were active
during the original experience. During the re-experience process, a
partial multimodal reenactment of the experience is produced. One reason why only parts of the original neural populations are
reactivated is that attention is selectively focused on certain aspects
of the experience that are most salient and important for the
individual.
The first theory of embodiment effect on emotions is known as James–Lange theory, after 19th century scientists William James and Carl Lange. They pointed out that physiological arousal
prior events generates a disposition to experience emotions, and so
emotions are not just reactions to these events but are also reflections
of dispositional body's states
Re-experience of emotion is produced in the originally implicated
sensory-motor systems as if the individual were there, in the very
situation, the very emotional state, or with the very object of thought. For example, the embodiment of anger might involve muscle tension used
to strike, the enervation of certain facial muscles to frown, etc. Such simulation is backed by a specialized mirror neuron or a "mirror neuron system", which maps the correspondences between the observed and performed actions. A remaining issue is the lack of consensus about the exact location of
the mirror neurons, whether they constitute a system, and whether there
actually are mirror neurons.
Theories of embodiment propose that the processing of emotional
states and the concepts used to refer to them are partly based on one's
own perceptual, motor, and somatosensory systems. Research has shown, through manipulations of facial expressions and
posture under controlled laboratory settings, how the embodiment of a
person's emotion casually affects the way emotional information is
processed. Similar studies have evidenced that nodding the head while listening to
persuasive messages led to more positive attitudes toward the message
than when shaking the head. When people are led to adopt certain bodily positions indirectly
associated with different feelings such as fear, anger, and sadness,
these corporeal postures are said to modulate the experienced affect. In a series of experiments on the neurobiological basis of language,
researchers investigated the role of embodiment in emotional language
through electromyographic (EMG)
measurements of specific muscle regions. They found that action verbs
that refer to positive emotional expressions (e.g., to smile) elicit
smile muscle activation as compared to mere positive adjectives
unrelated to actions (e.g., funny). Further research found that action
verb stimuli also yield muscle activation and shape judgment only when
muscle activation is not inhibited. Thus, these results suggest that
language is embodied rather than symbolic.
Given the significant role emotions (e.g., fear and hope) play in
an individual's life, research has been done linking embodiment,
motivation, and behavior to investigate the intrinsic tendencies to act
towards or away from a given stimulus. The approach and avoidance conflict (AAC) or approach and avoidance task
(AAT) describes a natural behavioral bias to approach pleasant stimuli
and avoid unpleasant ones (congruent response) faster than approaching
unpleasant stimuli and avoiding pleasant ones (incongruent responses).
The
approach and avoidance task. The top image depicts the zooming-out
effect for avoidance and the bottom image the zooming-in effect for
approach (as indicated by the arrows on the computer screen). The
smaller images exemplify the approach and avoidance task performed by
participants when using either the response pad or the joystick.
The
approach-avoidance distinction is fundamental and basic to motivation,
so much that it may be used as a conceptual lens through which to view
the structure and function of self-regulation
The AAT has been investigated in different scenarios and with
different types of stimuli such as words and images. A study focusing on
the AAT on embodied cognition, for example, examined people's response
to positive and negative words presented on the center of a screen by
moving them away or towards the center. The study concludes that
participants moved the given positive words towards the center of the
screen while moving the negative words away from the center of the
screen. In conformity with the AAT, participants showed an approach effect for positive words and avoidance effects for negative words. In a 2021 study on emotional or affective priming,
the AAT was used to demonstrate the interaction between emotions and
visual exploration. Pictures of news pages were presented on the
computer screen and eye movements were measured. Researchers found out
that the participants' harmonious bodily interaction during the
emotional preparation process shows that their interest in the image's
content displayed on the computer screen increased. These findings
demonstrate the effect of emotional priming in the approach and
avoidance behavior. A study on the behavioral aspects of the AAT suggests that there is an embodied component that is crucial to it. To investigate the role of gestures in AAT, participants were asked to
react to positive and negative stimuli by either pressing a (far or
near) button on a response pad; or by pushing forward or pulling
backward a joystick. Researchers reported a significant response time
advantage for the congruent responses when performed with the joystick
and none when performed with the response pad. The fact that
participants are faster at responding to the stimuli with the joystick
seems to suggest the role of a crucial embodied component. In contrast
to the response pad, the joystick couples more naturally with the body
(hand) for the performance of the action and facilitates the gesture of
approaching or avoiding positive or negative stimuli.
Evolutionary psychologists view emotion as an important self-regulatory aspect of embodied cognition, and emotion as a motivator towards goal-relevant action. Emotion helps drive adaptive behavior. The evolutionary perspective considers both spoken and written language as forms of embodied cognition. Pacing and non-verbal communication reflect embodied cognition in spoken language. Technical aspects of written language (such as italics, all caps, and emoticons) promote an inner voice and thereby a sense of feeling rather than thinking about a written message. At least some abstract words are said to be semantically grounded in
emotional knowledge; they are "embodied". Whereas the meanings of the
words "eye" and "grasp" can be explained to a degree, by pointing to
objects and actions, those of "beauty" and "freedom" can not. Abstract
terms show a strong tendency to be semantically linked to knowledge
about emotions. In addition, abstract words strongly activate the anterior cingulate
cortex, a site known to be relevant for emotion processing. Motor system
activation for emotion-expressing body parts was found when adults
processed abstract emotion words, indicating that, for one important class of abstract concepts, semantic
grounding in emotion-expressing action can partly explain the
meaning–symbol link.
Self-regulation
The basic idea underlying findings on embodied cognition is that cognition is composed of experiences that are multimodal and spread throughout the body, not in a way that amodal
semantic nodes are stored purely in the mind. In line with this idea of
embodied cognition, the body itself can also be involved in
self-regulation.
Self-regulation
can be defined as the capacity of organisms to successfully implement
goal-consistent responses despite distracting or countervailing
influences. Most people undergo a dilemma when they encounter immediate pains to gain long-term benefits. When facing this dilemma, the body can help augment willpower by
evoking nonconscious willpower-strengthening goals that boost people's
ongoing conscious attempts to facilitate their pursuit of long-term
goals.
In a study, the effect of muscle-firming
on donating money to Haiti was investigated. The participants either
held the pen to fill out the donation sheet in their fingers ("control
conditions") or in their hands ("muscle-firming" condition).
Significantly, more participants of the "muscle-firming" group donated
money than of the control group. One can therefore deduce that firming
one's muscles can help to get over their physical aversion to viewing
the devastation in Haiti and spending money. Similarly, physical or environmental cues signal the energetic costs of
action and, subsequently, influence willingness to engage in additional
volitional action. Studies have also shown that exposure to physical or conceptual thirst
or dryness-related cues reduces perceived energy and, successively,
decreases self-regulation. These studies suggest that embodied cognition
can play a role in self-regulation.
Some suggest that the embodied mind serves self-regulatory
processes by combining movement and cognition to reach a goal. Thus, the
embodied mind has a facilitative effect. To navigate the social world,
one must approach helpful resources such as friends and avoid dangers
like foes. Facial expression can be a signal for evaluation of whether a
person is desirable or dangerous. Embodied cognition can aid in
clarifying others' emotions when emotional signals may be ambiguous. In a study, participants were able to identify expression shifts faster
when they mimicked them in contrast to participants holding a pen in
their mouths that froze their facial muscles, therefore, unable to mimic
facial expressions. Other goal-relevant actions may be encouraged by embodied cognition, as
evidenced by the automated approach and avoidance of certain
environmental cues. Embodied cognition is also influenced by the
situation. If one moves in a way previously associated with danger, the
body may require a higher level of information processing
than if the body moves in a way associated with a benign situation. The
studies above may suggest that embodied cognition could serve a
functional purpose by assisting in self-regulatory processes.
Social cognition
Results
from a social embodied cognition study that illustrate the relationship
between positive emotions, observed behavioral synchrony, and embodied
rapport
In social psychology, and more specifically in social cognition,
research focuses on how people interact and influence one another. In
the context of embodiment, research in social cognition investigates how
the presence of people and interactions between them affects each
other's thoughts, feelings, and behavior. More precisely, social cognition proposes that thoughts, feelings, and
behavior are grounded in sensorimotor experiences and bodily states.
Visual Perspective Taking. VDP1: From his perspective, the ball is not visible. VDP2: The woodpile is on the left of the tree.
In the field of phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty's intercorporeity means that when meeting a person, one initially experiences the other
person via their bodily expressions, which has an impact before
cognitive reflections. This phenomenon is investigated in social psychology and is known as nonverbal synchrony. Synchrony during social interaction arises spontaneously and is often independent of conscious information processing.
In a dyadic
social interaction study from 2014, same-sex participants interacted
verbally in "cooperative", "competitive", and "fun task" conditions. The
focus of this study was to investigate the connection between the
participants' affectivity and nonverbal synchrony. Results showed that
positive emotions were associated with positive synchrony while negative
emotions were associated negatively. Other findings describe a causal
relation between synchrony and emotions with synchrony leading to affect
rather than vice versa. In a similar study, same-sex participant pairs were instructed to
alternate asking certain questions and to progressively self-disclose.
Results show that people spontaneously move together in space and
synchronize their movement, enhancing the quality of interaction
(embodied rapport). Self-disclosure and behavioral synchrony correlate with positive emotions towards another person. These two exemplary studies describe how nonverbal, behavioral
synchrony of bodily movements influences the psychological experience of
the interaction between people. These findings support the embodiment
thesis idea of bodily experiences affecting people's psychological and
emotional states.
One aspect of social cognition concerns perspective-taking, which
consists in perceiving a situation from another person's point of view.
Two categories of perspective-taking include visual and spatial
perspective-taking. Visual perspective-taking (VPT) is defined as
viewing a situation from another person's point of view and
understanding how they see the world. Spatial perspective-taking (SPT)
involves the ability to access what spatial information another viewer
is perceiving, such as the orientation of objects in relation to each
other. Accordingly, VPT has two different levels. VPT1 refers to understanding
what is in someone else's point of view; VPT2 entails adopting this
point of view and understanding how the world is represented from this
point of view. Both levels are grounded and situated, yet it is only
VPT2 that is embodied; it is only VPT2 that relies on deliberate
movement simulation. In the case of SPT, research has shown that not only the presence of
another person in the position of potential actions on objects leads to
SPT in participants, but also phrasing the query in terms of actions
increases the number of people who participate in SPT. The embodiment of SPT is also dependent on sex and social skills. Males
and people with lower social skills are said to have lower levels of
embodiment in SPT as compared to females and people with higher social
skills.
Research suggests that aging affects social cognition and
perspective-taking. In one study, four experiments evaluated implicit
and explicit VPT as well as executive and social cognition measures in
healthy young and older adults. Congruency effect (the detrimental
effect of congruency of the alternative perspective on response time and
accuracy) was detected in both egocentric and allocentric conditions in
explicit VPT1 and VPT2. Incongruencies in VPT1 less influenced older
adults. In VPT2, older adults showed a more significant congruency
effect and influence of allocentric perspective during egocentric
judgment. These results could explain the impairment of older adults in
social tasks that rely on perspective-taking.
Sensorimotor contingencies
As a part of the embodied cognition theory, proponents suggest that an organism's sensory and the motor systems are dynamically integrated. This idea is known as sensorimotor coupling which allows sensory information to be efficiently used during action. Similarly, the concept of sensorimotor contingencies (SMCs) states that the quality of perception
is determined by the knowledge of how sensory information changes when
one acts in the world. As an example, to look underneath an object, one
has to bend down, shift one's head, and change the gaze direction. Proponents of the SMCs theory argue that every stimulus modality
/ sensory modality such as light, sound pressure, etc. follow specific
rules (i.e. sensorimotor contingencies) that govern those changes of
sensory information. Consequentially, since those rules differ between
modalities, also the qualitative experience of them differs. There are multiple examples that highlight the distinction between SMCs
of different modalities. An instance of an SMC distinct for the visual percept is the expansion of the flow pattern on the retina when the body moves forward and the analogous contraction when the body moves backward. In contrast, auditory
SMCs are affected by head rotations which change the temporal
asynchrony of a received signal between the right and the left ear. This
movement mainly affects the amplitude and not the frequency of the sensory input.
Support for the SMCs theory is brought forward by studies on sensory substitution and research on the field of robotics.
Research on sensory substitution and sensory substitution devices
investigates the replacement of one modality by another (e.g. visual
information replaced by tactile information). The core idea is that sensorimotor contingencies of one modality are
transmitted via another modality. Sensory augmentation aims for the
perception of a new sense via already existing perceptual channels. In
this case, sensory augmentation allows for new sensorimotor
contingencies to be formed. In the field of robotics, researchers
investigate, for example, how visual SMCs are learned on a neural level
with the help of a robotic arm and dynamic neural fields.
Applications
Over the past years, embodied cognition research has gradually
redeemed the scientific study of bodily experiences and simultaneously
laid a theoretical and empirical foundation across multiple disciplines. Principles and findings underlying embodied cognition have begun to be
transferred and applied in several fields ranging from education,
robotics, clinical settings, social psychology, sports, to music.
Education
Embodied cognition findings have been translated into an overhaul of
educational and teaching practices in favor of embodied learning and
teaching methods. In particular, such embodied practices feature
prominently in science education. For example, Energy Theater is a method for teaching about energy
dynamics based on the embodied interaction theory. In this method,
participants each play the role of a unit of energy, and together, they
enact the transformation and transfer of energy in specific scenarios.
The Human Orrery is another embodied educational method in which students learn about the Solar System
through enactment. In this method, the position of the planets is
marked by disks, and the participants enact the role of the planets by
moving on their orbits.
The Mathematics Imagery Trainer for Proportion. A tool to help students learn proportion.
In a survey from 2020, researchers analyzed several frameworks that
bring embodied cognition theory into clever classroom practices for the
teaching and learning of mathematics. The embodied design-based research program identifies and classifies at
least two forms of embodied designs: perception and action-based
designs. In perception-based designs, the target is a/b concepts such as
likelihood, slope, and proportional equivalence in geometrical
similitude. The first step in this design involves asking students to
use their naïve worldview to judge a set of material presented to them
by their teacher, which affirms their naïve worldview. Afterward,
teachers provide students with appropriate media and attempt to guide
them to build models by following the formal procedure. In action-based
designs, learners are presented with sensorimotor problems. Abrahamson
and colleagues developed the "Mathematical Imagery Trainer" platform to
explore this design. In one particular version of this platform,
designed to teach proportions to learners, they moved two cursors with
both hands to turn a screen green. The screen would only turn green when
the height of right and left hands from the base had a particular
ratio. Once learners discovered the strategy to solve this problem, the
grid and numerals are added to the screen to shift learners from a
qualitative to a quantitative understanding of the concept at hand.
Overall, embodied cognition has served as a new framework for
exploring the learning process and developing new educational practices.
The older educational methods are slowly being replaced or complemented
by the new approaches inspired by embodied cognition theory.
School
Embodied cognition has increasingly informed educational practice,
particularly in school settings. A 2025 scoping review by Faella,
Digennaro and Iannaccone identified a range of embodied learning
strategies applied in classrooms, demonstrating positive effects on
student engagement, conceptual understanding, and learning outcomes.
Key approaches include:
Kinesthetic learning activities – Incorporating physical
movement into instruction, such as using gestures to represent
mathematical operations or dramatising historical events, supports
comprehension and long-term retention.
Gesture-based learning – Encouraging the use of spontaneous
or instructed hand gestures while learning enhances cognitive processing
and memory formation.
Use of physical manipulatives – Tangible tools are employed,
particularly in mathematics and science, to help students internalise
abstract concepts through direct sensorimotor interaction.
Technology integration – Motion-based digital tools, such as
virtual reality and embodied learning games, create multisensory
environments that engage learners more deeply.
The review also noted the importance of teacher training in embodied
learning methods and the design of flexible classroom spaces that
facilitate movement and interaction. Overall, the integration of
embodied cognition principles into school curricula has been linked to
improved academic performance, motivation, and cognitive development.
AI and robotics
Embodied cognition has significantly impacted artificial intelligence
(AI) and robotics; it has contributed to the drastic changes AI has
been through over the last years. Insights from embodied cognition have allowed researchers to build more
dynamic robots with more fluid and more expressive motions facilitating
better performance in complex scenarios.
Shakey the robot
is a well-known milestone in AI; it was one of the first approaches to
building mobile robots capable of reasoning about their own actions and
performing specific tasks in a determined environment. Shakey had a
relatively simple body and followed commands by itself, melding logical
reasoning with physical action to navigate in a room. A limitation was
that Shakey's architecture (Lisp)
relied heavily on symbolic computational principles that, consequently,
demanded that it iterate through long command sequences to perform a
particular action. Thus, Shakey was slow and could take days to complete
particular tasks. Besides, Shakey's performance was constrained by a
highly controlled environment.
An Atlas robot connecting a hose to a pipe in a Gazebocomputer simulationAn Atlas robot climbing into a vehicle. The image was recreated in a Gazebo computer simulation.
Embodied AI tries not to overlook or underestimate the "body" when
creating AI systems. It poses that future research should move towards
systems that incorporate embodied perspectives. The body as a contributor to states of the mind is seen as more than a
mere follower of (algorithmic) instructions. Embodiment is said to shape
intelligent information processing because "intelligence is
fundamentally a result of embodied interaction which exploits structure
in the world".
Embodied AI gave birth to situated robotic perspectives that
included more versatile AI architectures. Situated robotics are based on
an incremental approach to AI and reliance on parallel activity
producers that interface effectively with action and perception. Unlike traditional robots, situated robots perform better in complex
and dynamic environments that create unpredictable situations for robots
most of the time. The behavior of these robots changes according to their environment so
that they can deal with incredibility in various situations. For instance, social situations are rife with unpredictability, and
social robots need to be able to predict all sorts of behaviors—human or
otherwise. In this vein, Jun Tani's lab has introduced an abstract
brain model called PV-RNN, based on the principle of free energy, and
has incorporated a meta-prior in it. While a high meta-prior leads to a
confident behavior generation in robots and ignores the behavior of
other robots, robots with a low meta-prior adapt to the behaviour of
other robots and avoid generating their own behavioral pattern.
Instances of situated robots include aerial robots developed by
companies such as senseFly, which produces fixed-wing autonomous drones
for professional use, owned by Parrot SA,
and Flyability, which builds drones for the inspection and exploration
of indoor and confined spaces. They rely on the research of Dario Floreano's laboratory on mini-robots and evolutionary robotics.
Another example of situated robots is Atlas. Built in 2013 by Boston Dynamics,
Atlas is an anthropomorphic robot with a height of 1.5 m and a weight
of 89 kg that can move with agility and diversity in various situations.
The algorithms of Atlas allow for the complex and dynamic interaction
between its body and the environment. The movement of Atlas is driven by
perception and has evolved over time from on-fly adjustment to
perceiving its environment.
The procedures and methods of investigation in clinical
neuropsychology have been directly influenced by localization and
computational approaches to cognition. These techniques have made
numerous contributions to the development of clinical practice. Embodied
cognition broadens the scope of clinical practice by providing a more
comprehensive view of cognitive processes under both normal and
pathological conditions by highlighting the role of the body and
sensory-motor experience in cognition. Thereby, challenging the
integration of embodied cognitive practices in clinical assessment and
diagnosis processes. For instance, there exist a number of interventions and therapies which
are incorporating the ability of the body to influence cognitive states
to aid individuals with psychological difficulties. An example is the already established use of behavioral treatments for children's disorders such as autism. Another example of embodied integrative therapies involves sensorimotor
retraining as well as stimulation techniques to prevent, reduce, or
release pain associated with phantom limbs. Also, fields of psychotherapy (body oriented psychotherapy and somatic psychology),
which are prominent in Europe and encompasses embodied interventions
such as dance and movement therapy, have begun to receive more empirical
support. Vittorio Guidano's post-rationalist cognitive therapy builds on Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's theory of autopoiesis
and postulates that human knowledge is emotional and embodied. One of
the most common integrative treatments of mental illness to the western
psychosocial sphere is via mindfulness practices and exercise.
Sport
Embodied cognitive perspectives can inform and impact motor skill research in the fields of sport and sport psychology. Studies have shown that the embodiment thesis comes into action through many ways in sport such as sport-related action-specific perception, understanding, prediction, judgement, training, and language comprehension.From an embodied cognition perspective, a study examined the relationship between previous motor and visual experience and the current officiating experience of expert judges and referees. It was reported that sports judges who had performed the judged tasks
and/or had experience observing others perform the specific tasks would
achieve better in judging a specific sport activity compared to someone
without this motor and observational experience. In another study, reading comprehension and memory were shown to be improved if the subject would simultaneously read the description of certain physical activity (e.g. basketball actions) and perform physical manipulations that were consistent with them. The action-based theory of reading comprehension states that the sensory system and motor system are involved during the process of understanding, imagining, and remembering an action described in a story, as if the reader was actually perceiving or executing that action. These and similar studies show the influence of embodied cognition in sport and sport psychology.
Embodied music cognition is a paradigm that puts forward the idea that bodily interactions with music significantly affect music cognition. Researchers proposed that musical emotions, meaning, and the feelings evoked by listening to music, are the vehicle for the embodiment of abstract thoughts. Thus music has a specific cognitive function that allows for this possibility. Researcher have suggested embodied music cognition occurs at two
levels: the surface level and the primary level. The surface level
includes psychomotor
activities of a music performer, visible bodily reactions to music, and
rhythmic entrainment. The primary level of embodied music cognition is
the tonal/temporal encoding of it; it commands the surface level.
The research on embodied music cognition focuses on two main
trends: exploring embodiment and expanding the concept of embodiment in
music. The first trend includes studies investigating bodily
articulation and gesturing in relation to music. Embodied music cognition considers musical experiences from an action and perception viewpoint. One can observe that many people move when they listen to music; in many cultures there is no clear distinction between music and dance.
Through the different movements of the body, it is assumed that people
are able to give meaning to music. This perspective is different from
the traditional approach to music cognition,
which bases musical meaning on merely perception-based analysis of
musical structure. Through the measurement of sounds, movement, human
physiology, and computational modeling, embodied music cognition is
constantly building up reliable knowledge about the role of the human
body in musical meaning formation.
Marina Korsakova-Kreyn (2018) proposes that musical cognition operates
on two interrelated levels of embodiment. The surface level refers to
observable bodily responses to music, including performers’ motor
actions, visible gestures, and rhythmic entrainment in listeners. This
level reflects the apparent physical articulation of musical experience.
The deep level is less visible and concerns the internal physiological
and perceptual responses to tonal and temporal structures.
Korsakova-Kreyn argues that musical meaning originates in how the body
reacts to tonal relationships arranged over time. These relationships
are built from basic melodic intervals that vary in tonal stability,
consonance, and dissonance, creating expectations that guide melodic
intentionality and the perception of musical motion. Tonal–temporal
structures are therefore understood as encoding musical content that
shapes motor behavior and underlies emotional and cognitive responses to
music.
This model links traditional musicological concepts with findings from
music perception, affective neuroscience, and brain plasticity in
musicians. The theory focuses on tonal music of the European tradition
and does not address aleatoric or non-Western musical systems. To make
the model accessible to nonmusicians, the original paper includes
explanations of basic music theory. Embodied music cognition is potentially applicable to better understand
the role of music in social interactions. Multiple studies show that
children move more synchronously with music when they dance as a group.
The second trend includes studies that strive to connect embodied music cognition to other research fields such as neurology and psychology. For example, a study showed that people who have Parkinson's disease and are primed by music instead of metronomes beeps are capable of both entrainment and control.
The study suggests that using the body to produce timed sequences of
action, particularly when music is used as a pacing cue, allows people
who have Parkinson's disease to achieve similar performance levels as
healthy individuals.
Social psychology
The embodiment has also important potential applications in social psychology,
where researchers have studied how people's own bodily states influence
their understanding and interaction with others. Researchers have
provided evidence demonstrating the influence of bodily states on social judgments and social behavior.
They described that people's experiences with physical temperature per
se can influence their perceptions of and prosocial behavior toward
other people, without their awareness. When people engage in motor movements that symbolized a particular
social category, it primes the use of such category in social judgment.
Activists have tried to combine social psychology research with principles of embodiment to further their goals. For instance, virtual reality (VR) has been used in what is called virtual reality therapy to invoke empathy in viewers. The New York Times created a VR project to display the experience of child refugees called "The Displaced". By grounding users in the experience of child refugees from different countries, this project triggered strong empathy in viewers. In the "6 x 9" project, Guardian has used VR to replicate the experience of solitary confinement in American prisons. "Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness" released in 2016, an exploration of the sensory, emotional, psychological experience of blindness using VR.
Controversy
Research on embodied cognition is extremely broad, covering a wide
range of concepts. Methods to study how human cognition is embodied vary
from experiment to experiment based on the operational definition
used by researchers. The evidence supporting embodiment abounds within
the different sciences, yet the interpretation of results and their
significance are still disputed and researchers continue looking for
appropriate ways to study and explain embodied cognition.
Interbrain neuroscience researchin adults and growing evidence of goal-directed behavior in fetusesraise doubts regarding independence and self-sufficiency of the embodied cognition position. Indeed, there are severe concerns about this viewpoint as the only
possible way to explain cognitive development in organisms at an early
stage; it seems that the complex process of emerging cognition requires
complementary views.
Binding problem
The binding problem
is the viewpoint on how organisms at the simple reflexes stage of
development overcome the threshold of the environmental chaos of sensory
stimuli. Using mathematical tools of communication theory, it shows the
insuperable high threshold of the cacophony of environmental stimuli
(the stimuli noise) for young organisms at the onset of life. While
young organisms need to combine objects, backgrounds, and abstract or
emotional features into a single experience to build a surrounding
reality, they cannot independently distinguish relevant sensory stimuli.
Even the embodied dynamical system approach cannot get around the cue
to noise problem. This ability requires categorizing the environment into objects that
come into being through (and only after) perception and intentionality. Embodied cognition position does not solve this problem.
Research with preverbal infants
Researchers have suggested that pre-verbal infants may be considered an ideal and naturalistic case for studying embodied cognition, especially embodied social cognition since they utilise symbols less than adults do. Some researchers have criticised this notion since it may be impossible to know which stage
of a preverbal infant is supposed to be the "ideal model" for embodied
social cognition, as infant cognition changes dramatically throughout
the preverbal period. A 9-month-old has reached a different
developmental stage than a 2-month-old.
Another major issue is whether or not a particular ability
reflects an embodied mode of processing. Looking-time, for example, is
said to likely be a better measure of embodied cognition than reaching
because infants that age lack certain fine motor skills.
Infants may first develop a passive mode of embodied cognition before
they develop the active mode involving fine motor movements. Researchers
have described how this is problematic in that there is no apparent
reason to suppose that the abilities described through looking-time paradigm reflect embodied processing. For the distinction between embodied and symbolic modes of processing to be useful in generating testable experimental hypotheses,
it must be clear what sort of evidence could, at least in principle,
allow a researcher to determine whether or not any particular ability is embodied.
Replication crisis and misinterpretation
A methodological phenomenon in the sciences is the replication crisis.
Inside the field of embodied cognition, it indicates that certain
findings have failed to be reproduced with the same results as the
originals. Such studies have in common the embodiment idea that bodily
experiences influence cognitive processes that are typically considered
as mental. For example, power posing
which is classified under embodied cognition because it states that
having a person physically expand their body increases their confidence,
failed to be replicated in several cases. Similarly, studies indicating that weight sensations activate concepts of importance, which in turn may affect morality-related variables, has also failed to be replicated. Researchers also could not replicate the previous findings claiming that holding a warm cup creates a sense of interpersonal warmth.
Researchers failing to replicate the same results does not prove
cognition is unaffected/uninfluenced by the body. There are still plenty
of findings within the topic of embodied cognition that are
scientifically sound. Some researchers state that many of the failed
attempts to replicate embodiment findings are due to priming. And many cases of facilitative movements of the body due to priming may
be incorrectly labeled as evidence of embodied cognition. The
pencil-in-teeth study evidencing embodied cognition may be considered
the result of priming. Researchers could have deduced that the quicker responses to positive
sentences by participants engaging their smiling muscles indicated
embodied cognition. Opponents argue that the effects obtained during
this experiment were primed or facilitated by the engagement of certain
facial muscles. Priming (pencil in teeth, lips) may causally induce
certain perceptual-motor activity that, in turn, induces certain
cognitive processes, without the perceptual-motor activity constituting
cognitive processing.
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