The body in cognitive psychology

Journal title PSICOTERAPIA PSICOANALITICA
Author/s Francesco Ianì
Publishing Year 2022 Issue 2022/1
Language Italian Pages 16 P. 157-172 File size 233 KB
DOI 10.3280/PSP2022-001012
DOI is like a bar code for intellectual property: to have more infomation click here

Below, you can see the article first page

If you want to buy this article in PDF format, you can do it, following the instructions to buy download credits

Article preview

FrancoAngeli is member of Publishers International Linking Association, Inc (PILA), a not-for-profit association which run the CrossRef service enabling links to and from online scholarly content.

By definition, cognitive psychology seems to study something that has nothing to do with the body: cognitive processes, mental representations, memory traces etc. In this article, the author tries to highlight how instead, at least in the last two decades, the body has become central to the debate of all those disciplines around cognitive science. The birth of the so-called Embodied Cognition (EC) represented somehow a revolution that radically changed the way scholars study the mind, at least in certain domains. Even from a critical point of view, the author would like to emphasise that one of the greatest merits of EC is that it has undermined the foundations of some of the assumptions of cognitive psychology. For instance, EC has undermined the clear distinction between procedural and declarative knowledge, the distinction between perception and action, and, more generally, between the perceived environment and the cognitive structures by which it is represented. The author aims to show how EC has thus highlighted the extreme epistemological and operational flexibility of our cognitive functions and their dependence on action and the body, distinguishing itself from numerous previous theories in which the primacy of the role of language was never questioned.

Keywords: body, cognitive functions, embodied cognition, memory.

  1. Ambrosini E., Costantini M. (2017). Body posture differentially impacts on visual attention towards tool, graspable, and non-graspable objects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 43: 360-370.
  2. Arminjon M., Preissmann D., Chmetz F., Duraku A., Ansermet F., Magistretti P.J. (2015). Embodied memory: unconscious smiling modulates emotional evaluation of episodic memories. Frontiers in Psychology, 6: 650.
  3. Bara B.G. (2000). Il metodo della Scienza Cognitiva: Un appoccio evolutivo allo studio della mente. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.
  4. Barsalou L.W., Niedenthal P.M., Barbey A.K., Ruppert J.A. (2003). Social embodiment. In Ross B.H. (ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory, Vol. 43, 43-92. San Diego: Elsevier Science Publishing Co.
  5. Bucciarelli M. (2007). How the construction of mental models improves learning. Mind & Society, 6: 67-89.
  6. Burgess N., Maguire E.A., O’Keefe J. (2002). The human hippocampus and spatial and episodic memory. Neuron, 35: 625-641. DOI: 10.1016/S0896-6273(02)00830-
  7. Caruana F., Borghi A.M. (2013). Embodied Cognition: una nuova psicologia. Giornale Italiano di Psicologia, 40: 23-48. DOI: 10.1421/7397
  8. Casasanto D., Dijkstra K. (2010). Motor action and emotional memory. Cognition, 115: 179-185.
  9. Damasio A.R. (1996). The somatic marker hypothesis and the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 351: 1413-1420.
  10. De Vignemont F. (2011). Embodiment, ownership and disownership. Consciousness and Cognition, 20: 82-93.
  11. Della Gatta F., Garbarini F., Puglisi G., Leonetti A., Berti A., Borroni P. (2016). Decreased motor cortex excitability mirrors own hand disembodiment during the rubber hand illusion. Elife, 5: e14972.
  12. Dijkstra K., Kaschak M.P., Zwaan R.A. (2007). Body posture facilitates retrieval of autobiographical memories. Cognition, 102: 139-149.
  13. Dijkstra K., Zwaan R.A. (2014). Memory and action. In: The Routledge handbook of embodied cognition, 296-305. London and New York: Routledge.
  14. Dijkstra K., Post L. (2015). Mechanisms of embodiment. Frontiers in Psychology, 6: 1525.
  15. Eichenbaum H., Cohen N.J. (2001). From conditioning to conscious recollection: Memory Systems of the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  16. Fodor, J. A. (1983). The modularity of mind. Cambridge: MIT press.
  17. Fodor J.A., Pylyshyn Z.W. (1988). Connectionism and cognitive architecture: A critical analysis. Cognition, 28: 3-71. DOI: 10.1016/0010-0277(88)90031-
  18. Gallese V., Sinigaglia C. (2011). What is so special about embodied simulation? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15: 512-519.
  19. González J., Barros-Loscertales A., Pulvermüller F., Meseguer V., Sanjuán A., Belloch V., Ávila C. (2006). Reading cinnamon activates olfactory brain regions. Neuroimage, 32: 906-912.
  20. Hagoort P. (2005). On Broca, brain, and binding: a new framework. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9: 416-423.
  21. Harnad S. (1990). The symbol grounding problem. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 42: 335-346. DOI: 10.1016/0167-2789(90)90087-
  22. Hauk O., Johnsrude I., Pulvermüller F. (2004). Somatotopic representation of action words in human motor and premotor cortex. Neuron, 41: 301-307. DOI: 10.1016/S0896-6273(03)00838-
  23. Hohwy J., Paton B. (2010). Explaining away the body: Experiences of supernaturally caused touch and touch on non-hand objects within the rubber hand illusion. PloS one, 5: e9416.
  24. Ianì F., Bucciarelli M. (2018). Relevance of the listener’s motor system in recalling phrases enacted by the speaker. Memory, 26: 1084-1092. DOI: 10.1080/09658211.2018.143321
  25. Ianì F., Burin D., Salatino A., Pia L., Ricci R., Bucciarelli M. (2018). The beneficial effect of a speaker’s gestures on the listener’s memory for action phrases: The pivotal role of the listener’s premotor cortex. Brain and Language, 180: 8-13.
  26. Ianì F. (2019). Embodied memories: Reviewing the role of the body in memory processes. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26: 1747-1766.
  27. Ianì F., Foiadelli A., Bucciarelli M. (2019). Mnemonic effects of action simulation from pictures and phrases. Acta Psychologica, 194: 37-50.
  28. Ianì F. (2021). Embodied cognition: So flexible as to be “disembodied”?. Consciousness and Cognition, 88.
  29. Ianì F. (2022). Embodied Cognition: una rivoluzione a metà?. Giornale Italiano di Psicologia. In Press.
  30. Varela F., Thompson E., Rosch E. (1991). The embodied mind. Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge: MIT Press.
  31. Ianì F., Limata T., Mazzoni G., Bucciarelli M. (2021). Observer’s body posture affects processing of other humans’ actions. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74: 1595-1604. DOI: 10.1177/1747021821100351
  32. Iriki A., Tanaka M., Iwamura Y. (1996). Coding of modified body schema during tool use by macaque postcentral neurones. Neuroreport, 7: 2325-2330. DOI: 10.1097/00001756-199610020-0001
  33. Jeannerod M. (2001). Neural simulation of action: a unifying mechanism for motor cognition. Neuroimage, 14: S103-S109.
  34. Johnson-Laird P.N. (1983). Mental models: Towards a cognitive science of language, inference, and consciousness (No. 6). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  35. Johnson-Laird P.N. (2006). How we reason. USA: Oxford University Press.
  36. Kammers M.P., Rose K., Haggard P. (2011). Feeling numb: Temperature, but not thermal pain, modulates feeling of body ownership. Neuropsychologia, 49: 1316-1321.
  37. Kent C., Lamberts K. (2008). The encoding–retrieval relationship: retrieval as mental simulation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12: 92-98.
  38. Körner A., Topolinski S., Strack F. (2015). Routes to embodiment. Frontiers in Psychology, 6: 940.
  39. Laird J.D., Wagener J.J., Halal M., Szegda M. (1982). Remembering what you feel: Effects of emotion on memory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42: 646-657. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.42.4.64
  40. Lakoff G., Johnson M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  41. Limata T., Ianì F., Bucciarelli M. (2022). Story order in attribution of moral responsibility. Language & Cognition, 1-21.
  42. Moseley G.L., Olthof N., Venema A., Don S., Wijers M., Gallace A., Spence C. (2008). Psychologically induced cooling of a specific body part caused by the illusory ownership of an artificial counterpart. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105: 13169-13173.
  43. Neisser U. (1967). Cognitive psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
  44. Newen A., De Bruin L., Gallagher S. (eds.) (2018). The Oxford handbook of 4E cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  45. Noë A. (2009). Out of our heads: Why you are not your brain, and other lessons from the biology of consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang.
  46. Persson J., Nyberg L. (2000). Conjunction analysis of cortical activations common to encoding and retrieval. Microscopy Research and Technique, 51: 39-44.
  47. Pylyshyn Z.W. (1984). Computation and cognition. Cambridge: MIT press.
  48. Pulvermüller F. (1999). Words in the brain’s language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22: 253-279. DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X9900182
  49. Pulvermüller F. (2005). Brain mechanisms linking language and action. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6: 576-582.
  50. Riskind J.H. (1983). Nonverbal expressions and the accessibility of life experience memories: A congruence hypothesis. Social Cognition, 2: 62-86.
  51. Rizzolatti G. (2005). The mirror neuron system and its function in humans. Anatomy and Embryology, 210: 419-421.
  52. Robinson M.D., Thomas, L.E. (2021). Handbook of Embodied Psychology: Thinking, Feeling, and Acting. Berlin: Springer.
  53. Simmons W.K., Ramjee V., Beauchamp M.S., McRae K., Martin A., Barsalou L.W. (2007). A common neural substrate for perceiving and knowing about color. Neuropsychologia, 45: 2802-2810.
  54. Tversky B., Hard B.M. (2009). Embodied and disembodied cognition: Spatial perspective-taking. Cognition, 110: 124-129.
  55. Vignemont F. (2011) Embodiment, ownership and disownership. PhilPapers.
  56. Veenstra L., Schneider I.K., Koole S.L. (2017). Embodied mood regulation: the impact of body posture on mood recovery, negative thoughts, and mood-congruent recall. Cognition and Emotion, 31: 1361-1376. DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2016.122500
  57. Wheeler M.E., Petersen S.E., Buckner R.L. (2000). Memory’s echo: vivid remembering reactivates sensory-specific cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97: 11125-11129.
  58. Willems R.M., Labruna L., D’Esposito M., Ivry R., Casasanto D. (2011). A functional role for the motor system in language understanding: evidence from theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation. Psychological Science, 22: 849-854. DOI: 10.1177/095679761141238
  59. Willems R.M., Francken J.C. (2012). Embodied cognition: taking the next step. Frontiers in Psychology, 3: 582.

  • Mind, Body, and Digital Brains Giulia Torromino, pp.173 (ISBN:978-3-031-58362-9)

Francesco Ianì, Il corpo nella psicologia cognitiva in "PSICOTERAPIA PSICOANALITICA" 1/2022, pp 157-172, DOI: 10.3280/PSP2022-001012