, Is just another factor that can affect cognition, and it is only a small part of the cognitive domain.
Scholars who believe in the power of embodied cognition believe that the influence of physical sensation on cognition is very special and should be distinguished from the existence of other factors. Some scholars even believe that the experimental results in the field of embodied cognition are not uniform enough to claim the existence of embodied cognition on the basis of existing evidence.
– Diamonster-
What is so magical about embodied cognition that scholars are arguing about it? Let us start from language, emotion and learning for the time being, and get a glimpse of the charm of this field.
The embodiment of language
Human language itself has an embodied element. Among them, the most typical and most discussed in the literature are the metaphors used in our language, especially metaphors.
From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, metaphor is universal, and metaphor is one of the important and basic ways in the process of human cognition. For example, in the book “The Metaphors We Live By”, the author mentioned the so-called “location metaphor”. Location metaphors are often based on human physical experience and co-exist in different cultures and languages. For example, the good is often at the top and high; the bad is often at the bottom and low. This is why there is “I’m feeling up/down today” in English and “I’m feeling up/down today” in Chinese.
For another example, the determined and known things are on the bottom, while the undecided and unknown things are on the top. For example, “Things are up in the air / Things are settled”, “Things are up in the air / Things are settled”.
In these expressions, our metaphors all contain a basis for our experience in the physical world. And only with thisBased on the experience, our metaphors can be understood. Therefore, the existence of location metaphor is closely connected with the relationship between our body and this physical world.
Try to imagine such a world: 0 points is the highest score, any score higher than 0 points, the higher the score, the worse it is. In this world, you probably won’t say “good is at the top” anymore! When you want to express your happiness, you might say: “I feel very depressed today!”
This may sound absurd. However, the absurd cognition you feel is actually derived from the accumulated feelings of the physical world and language world. If you have lived in this imaginary world since you were young, you won’t feel that there is any problem with the metaphor of “below means good/upper means bad”.
—moon Haoyue ©
As Li Hengwei, professor of philosophy at Zhejiang University, said: “Cognitive linguistics believes that the acquisition of conceptual meaning and the structure of conceptual systems in language are not created out of thin air. From the perspective of the process of occurrence, they are derived from people’s initial physical experience. Metaphorical projection. It is common for body experience to be used in abstract concepts, such as Affection Is Warmth, Important Is Big, Happy Is Up, Intimacy Is Closeness… The reason why metaphorical projection is possible is firstly because the human body experience itself is direct, Meaningful structure.”
The use we are used to now comes from the body’s feelings about the world, and this feeling is not only limited to individuals, it has been in the long river of times, through generations The accumulation of generations in the physical world affects our culture, language and cognition.
Emotional embodiment
Emotions are a very ambiguous existence, and we are willing to believe that we are the masters of emotions. This has a lot to do with our desire to control emotions. We don’t want emotions to be controlled by the brain, or personal intentions.Affected by things other than Chi. This may explain to some extent, why we tend to think that our body is subordinate to our brain and is completely governed by the brain.
However, the embodied research on emotions shows that emotions are affected by body movement and physical perception; and, this emotion can be unspecific-that is, you have a body movement Your perception can affect emotions that you feel are unrelated at the conscious level. Theories and research indicate that our perception and processing of emotions are composed of the effects of hormones in the body, perception, and the process of re-experiencing emotions.
This is actually not entirely a very rebellious idea. As early as 1988, there have been experiments on controlling facial expressions to affect emotional cognition. In an article in the journal Science in 2007, the author also pointed out that people’s facial expressions and body movements can be controlled to change their emotional processing and perception.
Experiments have shown that people’s facial expressions will affect people’s emotional perception of the interestingness of things. In the experiment, the subjects need to hold a pen with their mouths sideways and watch the cartoon. When the subject is holding the pen horizontally, the mouth will naturally make a smile, and when the subject is holding the pen vertically, it will make a serious pouting face (Picture below).
Compared with holding a pen vertically, when the subjects made a smiling face with a pen horizontally, they would consider it more interesting when evaluating the cartoon. Similarly, when the subjects read an article with a pen, they read and understood the happy event when the pen was held horizontally (smiling expression) Sentences take less time than holding a pen vertically. It seems that when your facial expression is smiling, it is easier for you to understand happy emotions. The same experimental results, such as the use of small currents to change people’s expressions, have also been found in other methods.
It should be noted that some experiments of embodied cognition are indeed controversial in academia. A large part of the reason is related to the crisis of reproducibility-not all experiments can get the same results after repeated trials. Readers still Need to be cautious.
To derive a bit, our body’s experience in the physical world will affect our emotions and our cognition of other things. Sometimes this influence can come from completely passive, involuntary body behaviors and movements. . In these experiments on the effects of embodied cognition on emotions, people’s actions are not spontaneous actions, which means that the brain does not instruct people for any actions, but comes from the requirements of the experiment.
And the experiment did not tell people to smile or pouting, but to use an action instruction holding a pen to make people make corresponding emotion-related actions. When people do this action, they don’t consciously feel that “I’m smiling” or “I’m pouting”, but just this kind of muscle action makes a significant change in people’s emotions and cognition.
Of course, in fact, there are more experiments in this area, and even experiments on how to use this theory to help treat depression. However, because some of the experiments mentioned by the author are extremely controversial, this article chooses not to discuss these experiments too much, but to focus the rest of the time on the widely recognized experimental findings*.
*Author’s note: This does not mean that the author agrees with or denies these experimental findings, but hopes that everyone will look at these experimental findings with a more scientific and critical eye.
The embodiment of learning
In addition to emotions, embodied cognition can also affect learning, cognition, and information processing. If we recognize the role of embodied cognition, we can also learn better in some abstract areas. In other words, body movements can also effectively help us solve problems and learn new knowledge.
Here, there is an assumption that is more adventurous and avant-garde from the perspective of the entire field: Our brain may not be the only problem-solving cognitive resource we have(Wilson&Golonka, 2013). Our body’s movement and experience in this physical world can also be used as a cognitive resource and tool to help us solve problems. Moreover, physical movement can replace many complex and difficult mental representations (that is, we originally neededrks”>9.Nathan, MJ, Walkington, C., Boncoddo, R., Pier, EL, Williams, CC, & Alibali, MW (2014). Actions speak louder with words: The roles of action and pedagogical language for grounding mathematical proof. Learning and Instruction, 33, 182–193.
10.Niedenthal, 2007
https://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~coulson/Courses/200/niedenthal-science-final-2007.pdf
11.Wilson, AD, & Golonka, S. (2013). Embodied cognition is not what you think it is. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, Article 58. https:/ /doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00058
12.Strack, F., Martin, LL, & Stepper, S. (1988). Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the human smile: A nonobtrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5), 768–777. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.54.5.768
13.Thomas, LE, Lleras, A. Swinging into thought: Directed movement guides insight in problem solving.Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 16, 719–723 (2009). https://doi.org/10.3758/ PBR.16.4.719
14.Zhang, I., Givvin, KB, Sipple, JM, Son, JY, & Stigler, JW (2021). Instructed Hand Movements Affect Students’ Learning of an Abstract Concept From Video. Cognitive Science, 45(2), e12940.
This article is from WeChat public account:Neural Reality (ID: neureality), author: Zhang Yun Yi