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COGNITION & LANGUAGE
Sharon Thompson-Schill: Tutorial: Beyond Embodiment
Thursday March 07, 2013 | 03:00 -05:00 PM | Cordura 100

Sharon Thompson-Schill, New York University

Abstract

In this talk, I will introduce you to a view of concepts that has become known "embodied cognition", which describes cognition as the extension of perception and action systems rather than as a separate set of processes. Beyond mere parsimony, the embodied cognition approach to knowledge representation has the advantage of circumventing the “symbol grounding problem”, that is, the problem of how meanings become connected to the world. For this reason, the framework is appealing, and evidence for modal semantic memory representations is widely touted; among these sources of evidence are numerous fMRI studies, which are the subject of the current discussion. I will argue that the fMRI data are largely either inconsistent with predictions of embodied cognition theories (despite how they are interpreted by their authors) or irrelevant to the question at hand. But, rather than throw in the towel, I will present fMRI findings that I will argue do advance our understanding of the cognitive and neural representation of concepts (regardless of whether they support strong claims about embodiment).