How the Body Shapes Knowledge

• If you are leaning backwards in your chair, are you more likely to think about the past than the future?
• When you say that someone "leaves me cold," do you literally feel cold?
• What role does the body play in our perceptions of the world?
• Is the mind a calculating machine, or are our thoughts and emotions "grounded" in specific, felt, bodily experience?

Questions like these have long driven research in embodied cognition, a theory of mental functioning that has gained increasing prominence in recent decades.

In this book, Rebecca Fincher-Kiefer explores embodied cognition from an experimental psychology perspective. She examines a wealth of evidence, including behavioral studies supported by neuroscientific findings, that suggests that our representations of the world are "grounded" in sensory and physical experience and the neural pathways that were used when we initially experienced those concepts.

A "reuse" of these same neural pathways, according to embodiment theory, is therefore what constitutes thinking.

With compelling descriptions and an investigative spirit, this book is essential reading for graduate and undergraduate students, and for anyone seeking to understand the past, present, and future of human cognition.

Preface

Acknowledgments

• Chapter 1: An Introduction to the Theory of Embodied Cognition
• Chapter 2: The Body's Role in Perception
• Chapter 3: The Body's Role in Social and Emotional Judgments
• Chapter 4: The Body's Role in Higher-Order Cognition
• Chapter 5: The Body's Role in Language Comprehension
• Chapter 6: The Role of Simulation in Cognitive Judgments
• Chapter 7: The Role of Simulation in Emotion
• Chapter 8: The Role of Metaphor in the Representation of Abstract Concepts
• Chapter 9: Reactions to the Theory of Embodied Cognition

References

Index

About the Author
 

Rebecca Fincher-Kiefer, PhD, is a professor of psychology at Gettysburg College, where she teaches courses on human cognition, statistics and research methods, and an advanced laboratory course on embodied cognition.

She received her doctorate in cognitive psychology from the University of Pittsburgh in 1988. Her research in inferential processing in text comprehension and the nature of the mental representations of text has been published in journals including Journal of Experiment Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Memory & Cognition, and Discourse Processes.

She has also served in several administrative roles at Gettysburg College, including chairman of the department of psychology for 6 years.

Visit Gettysburg College - Rebecca Fincher-Kieferopens in new window.

The strength of this book is that it identifies critical, empirical questions that psychologists have used to test the model, identifying how embodied cognition accounts for diversity of psychological thought, ranging from relatively simple perception to complex, abstract thought and emotion. The author’s interesting and cogent ideas could pave the way for more investigation and replication to assess the robustness of the theory.
—Choice

Lindsay and Norman's brilliant book, Human Information Processing, has inspired students, teachers, and cognitive scientists for 5 decades by promoting the then-radical computer metaphor for mind. This volume describes a now-radical framework for how mind emerges from action of the whole organism, a framework that may well inspire the field for the next 5 decades.
—Arthur Glenberg, PhD
Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, and INICO, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain