Abstract
From the time the notion “embodied cognition” has entered the field, researchers have been concerned about its meaning. Does the term refer to a coherent theoretical framework? Despite these concerns, use of the term “embodied cognition” has increased over the years to plateau in recent years. I will argue that the best way forward is not to search for evidence for or against some vague label but rather to systematically, in large-scale projects, address a series of questions that focus on well-defined cognitive tasks. Such projects ought involve preregistration, replication, and open materials, code, and data. For this enterprise to take off, it is important that incentives in the field be aligned with the goal to increase the reliability and validity of our research. There is reason to be optimistic that such an alignment will occur in the near future.
Highlights
This analysis was performed on January 29, 2021
I will focus on two major challenges to “embodied cognition,” the definitional challenge and the methodological challenge, the latter of which overlaps with one of the challenges discussed by Ostarek and Huettig, their focus differs from mine
This study found support for the actionsentence compatibility effect (ACE)
Summary
Even though I used “embodied cognition” as part of a search string, it is legitimate to wonder what is meant by “embodied cognition.” One might even wonder, what is “embodied” and what is “cognition”? Under the rubric of embodied cognition, we can find research inspired by theories that originated in the 1980s and 1990s, such as linguistic theories about the role of metaphors in language and cognition (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), neuroscientific theories about grasping behavior and action and language understanding (Rizzolatti & Arbib, 1998), as well as a more conventional cognitive psychological theory about mental representations in language comprehension, memory, and thinking (Barsalou, 1999). We should first consider the level of analysis (words, sentences, texts), the type or genre (e.g., nouns, declarative sentences, simple narratives), the language (e.g., English, Spanish, Chinese) and the task at hand and use these to define as best as possible the constraints on generalizability of our findings (Simons, Shoda, & Lindsay, 2017). To be sure, this makes the projected impact of our work a great deal more modest, but it is much more workable if the ultimate goal is to create a coherent theory of cognition.
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