Embodiment and cognitive neuroscience: the forgotten tales
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Embodiment and cognitive neuroscience: the forgotten tales Vicente Raja 1 Accepted: 4 November 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In this paper, I suggest that some tales (or narratives) developed in the literature of embodied and radical embodied cognitive science can contribute to the solution of two longstanding issues in the cognitive neuroscience of perception and action. The two issues are (i) the fundamental problem of perception, or how to bridge the gap between sensations and the environment, and (ii) the fundamental problem of motor control, or how to better characterize the relationship between brain activity and behavior. In both cases, I am going to propose that cognitive neuroscience could incorporate embodied insights—coming from the sensorimotor approach to perception and action, and from ecological psychology—to advance the solution for each issue without the need for abandoning or undergoing a substantial revision of its core assumptions. Namely, cognitive neuroscience could incorporate the forgotten tales of embodiment without undergoing through a complete revolution. In this sense, I am proposing not a call but a farewell to arms. Keywords Cognitive neuroscience . Embodied cognition . Ecological psychology .
Sensorimotor approach
1 Introduction One fundamental issue in cognitive neuroscience, at least regarding perception1 and action, is illustrated by the very first paragraph of David Marr’s seminal work Vision: What does it mean, to see? The plain man’s answer (and Aristotle’s, too) would be, to know what is where by looking. In other words, vision is the process of 1
I will focus on vision for the sake of simplicity, but what follows can be applied to any perceptual system.
* Vicente Raja [email protected]; [email protected]; http://www.emrglab.org
1
Rotman Institute of Philosophy, Western University, 1151 Richmond StreetOntario N6A 5B7 North London, Canada
V. Raja
discovering from images what is present in the world, and where it is. (Marr 1982/2010, p. 3; emphasis in the original). The part of this quote I want to highlight is ‘in other words’. It might seem peripheral, but indeed it points out one of the core assumptions in the cognitive neuroscience of vision: looking is the same as the process of discovering the world from images. The latter is the former said in other words. Such an assumption underlies Marr’s work but also the general information-processing approaches to vision (Stone 2012) and contemporary approaches based on Bayesian inference, such as predictive processing (Dayan and Abbott 2001; Friston 2005, 2010). The general idea is that the ‘visual’ brain is in the business of bridging the gap between what it gets (i.e., retinal image, sensory stimuli) and what causes it (i.e., the environment, the world). This is, in other words, the aim of visual perception as far as the dominant narrative in cognitive neuroscience is concerned. Embodiment is, to an important extent, a reaction to this narrative.2 In the case of vision, embodiment is a reaction to the assumpti
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