Six Views Of Embodied Cognition Theory

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Embodied cognition is a relatively recent comprehensive framework for the study of mind. This kind of approach has recently attained high acceptance in cognitive psychology arena. There is a growing idea that the mind must be understood in the context of agent’s relationship and interaction with the world. Lots of support coming in from the experimental procedures in psychology where the psychologists will ask subjects to perform some sort of tasks and then by making manipulation on their bodies in certain ways. They find that the subjects differ and the result depending on simple facts even such as whether they are right or left handed. There is also works in robotics where robots have been designed that seemed to perform complex behaviors …show more content…

Wilson:
Margret Wilson distinguishes and evaluates the following six claims: (1) cognition is situated, (2) cognition is time pressured, (3) we off load the cognitive work onto the environment, (4) the environment is the part of cognitive system, (5) cognition is for action, (6) offline cognition is body based. Let’s tackle one by …show more content…

Cognitive system is evolved because it is a behavioral control system which is very much important trait for adaptation. Cognitive systems should be studied in terms of their function in serving, and when we look in this way it is hard to alienate the world from the cognitive system. For example, traditional view of visual perception proposes that visual system is present for the building of internal representation of the perceived world, which is used by some higher mechanisms in the brain. But now it is much clear that generally visual perception is used for guiding actions. For instance there is a study by Krish and Maglio (1994) on Tetris game. In the Tetris game falling block shapes must be rotated and horizontally fitted as compact as possible along with the shapes already fallen. This decision of rotation should be made very early before the block falls far down to allow the possible movements. The data shows that players use actual rotation and translation movements to simplify the problem to be solved, rather than computing a solution in mind first then executing it. This clearly shows that visual cognition is used in guiding action

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