Abstract
Embodied Cognition (EC) is a growing popular research program which is general in cognitive science and particular in cognitive psychology. The embodied cognition is featured as the emphasis it places on the role the body plays in one’s cognitive processes. Its central meaning includes the following claims: (1) one’s actions and other body-related traits (e.g. posture) have an effect on one’s cognition; (2) our understanding of the world is not an abstract proposition but fundamentally depends on our multisensory experiences with it and relevant experiences include movements, emotional events, and the processing of spatial and temperature dimensions; (3) cognition is a progress that is continuously evolutionary, developmental and environmental, rather than a kind of prior logical ability. Body movement itself reflects survival intentionality to promote cognitive development, and one’s cognition is meshed with the world. In the recent decades, embodied cognition gets more and more popular in psychology liking a ghost floating above.
Actually, it has a long past instead of being a ghost. In the history of human thought, lots of thoughtful people such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Dewey have criticized dualism and put forward that the body and the mind are actually an integrated whole. The paper “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”, wrote by Dewey in 1896 and published on The Psychological Review, containing the prototype of embodied cognition, its central meaning as following includes: (1) coordination of body movement constitutes the sensory-motor circuit; (2) in the sensory-motor circuit ,body experience based on the coordination of body movement is continuous; (3) coordination of body movement and continuity of body experience are the component of the organism which is meshed with the environment, so their ultimate goal is to adapt to the environment.
Johnson (2010) has summarized that following William James and C.S. Peirce, Dewey crafts a non-dualistic, body-based theory of human cognition, a view grounded in the brain science and psychology of his day, but also remarkably consonant with so-called “embodied cognition” views in contemporary cognitive neuroscience. In the paper “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”, Dewey emphasized that the coordination of body movement and the continuity of body experience controlled one’s sensory-motor circuit. Moreover, he also stressed that we shouldn’t study the sensory-motor circuit regardless of the environment because they were a unity. These views are consistent with the claims of embodied cognition in contemporary psychology that the body movement and body experience have an influence on one’s cognition while body, cognition and environment are a unity. Compared with the viewpoints of embodied cognition in contemporary psychology, Dewey’s viewpoints showed in the paper “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” have something new. On the one hand, Dewey stressed the coordination of body movement affecting one’s cognition instead of separating the body movement as contemporary study does. On the other hand, compared with the study of contemporary embodied cognition, he paid attention to the continuity of body experience. Finally, he considered adapting to the environment as a final goal of organism's cognition rather than a factor affecting one’s cognition. Therefore, in our future research, we can refer to Dewey’s foresight of embodied cognition.
Key words
Embodied Cognition /
Dewey /
Reflex Arc /
The Sensory-Motor Circuit /
Experience Continuity /
Acclimatization
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Anna CHEN Wei.
The Thought of Embodied Cognition in Dewey’s Reflex Arc Concept[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2013, 36(1): 251-255
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