The role of perception and action on memory, language and thinking

Tuesday, 20 May 2014

One of the key questions in cognitive psychology is how people represent
knowledge about concepts such as football or love. Recently,
some researchers have proposed that concepts are represented in human
memory by the sensorimotor systems that underlie interaction
with the outside world. These theories represent a recent development
in cognitive science to view cognition no longer in terms of abstract
information processing, but in terms of perception and action.
In other words, cognition is grounded in embodied experiences. Studies
show that sensory perception and motor actions support human
understanding of words and object concepts. Moreover, even understanding
of abstract and emotion concepts can be shown to rely on
more concrete, embodied experiences. Finally, language itself can be
shown to be grounded in sensorimotor processes

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