Grounding Cognition The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking - DIANE PECHER.pdf - psG - DarkDream

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Grounding Cognition

One of the key questions in cognitive psychology is how people rep-

resent knowledge about concepts such as football or love. Recently,

some researchers have proposed that concepts are represented in hu-

man memory by the sensorimotor systems that underlie interaction

with the outside world. These theories represent a recent develop-

ment in cognitive science to view cognition no longer in terms of ab-

stract information processing, but in terms of perception and action.

In other words, cognition is grounded in embodied experiences. Stud-

ies show that sensory perception and motor actions support human

understanding of words and object concepts. Moreover, even under-

standing 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. This book brings

together theoretical arguments and empirical evidence from several

key researchers in this ﬁeld to support this framework.

Diane Pecher is assistant professor at the Erasmus University

Rotterdam (The Netherlands). She received a Ph.D. from the Uni-

versity of Amsterdam in 1999. Her dissertation Dynamics of Semantic

Memory was supervised by Jeroen G. W. Raaijmakers. Her research

is funded by a grant from the Netherlands Organization of Scientiﬁc

Research (NWO).

Rolf A. Zwaan is Professor of Psychology at Florida State University.

He received his Ph.D. from Utrecht University, The Netherlands, in

1992 and is the author of more than 60 scientiﬁc publications. His

journal publications include articles in Psychological Science , Cognition ,

and Psychological Bulletin . His research is funded by grants from the

National Institutes of Health.

Grounding Cognition

The Role of Perception and Action in

Memory, Language, and Thinking

Edited by

DIANE PECHER

Erasmus University Rotterdam

ROLF A. ZWAAN

Florida State University

Grounding Cognition The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking - DIANE PECHER.pdf