A critical look at the embodied cognition hypothesis and a new proposal for grounding conceptual content.

By Bradford Z. Mahon, Alfonso Caramazza. Journal of Physiology - Paris, 2008

1,260 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/553cfea38b8d143688aed357b95d9d953e1ed511

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Citations in the corpus

The Neurobiology of Semantic Memory (2011, neutral): “One objection is that activations observed in imaging experiments could be epiphenomenal and not causally related to comprehension [17].”
The Two Forms of Visuo-Spatial Perspective Taking are Differently Embodied and Subserve Different Spatial Prepositions (2010, background): “…mapped motor response a body rotation is fully simulated (cf. Kessler and Thomson, 2010), while in the case of a verbal response VPT-2 could rely on the transformation of a more abstract “disembodied” (e.g., geometric) representation of the egocentric perspective (e.g., Mahon and Caramazza, 2008).”
Mental imagery of speech: linking motor and perceptual systems through internal simulation and estimation (2012, methodology): “The isomorphic transformation from motor to perceptual systems relies on the established internal associations between motor and perceptual representations, which are presumably formed following the causal and ecologically valid sequential occurrence of action-perception pairs, through the mechanism”
Thinking in Words: Language as an Embodied Medium of Thought (2014, background): “Our facility with abstract concepts, however, poses a serious challenge to embodied cognition (Chatterjee, 2010; Dove, 2009; Mahon & Caramazza, 2008; Weiskopf, 2007).”
Pupillometry: Psychology, Physiology, and Function (2018, background): “…when participants read a word, they automatically simulate the perceptual properties of the word’s referent (e.g. Pulvermüller, 2013; but see Mahon & Caramazza, 2008 for a different perspective); for example, when participants read ‘sun’, they automatically create a mental image of a…”
Eight Problems for the Mirror Neuron Theory of Action Understanding in Monkeys and Humans (2009, background): “What does the mirror system reflect? There are two possibilities, as suggested by Mahon and Caramazza ( 2008 ) in their critical analysis of “embodied cognition” hypotheses, generally.”
How Language Programs the Mind (2016, background): “…question often raised about these findings is whether the motor, perceptual , and affective representations activated by words is epiphenomenal—perhaps words tend to activate these representations downstream but word meanings involve a totally distinct set of mechanisms (Mahon & Caramazza, 2008).”
Conceptual representations in mind and brain: theoretical developments, current evidence and future directions. (2012, background): “(ii) Words with abstract meaning were seen to elicit relatively stronger left-lateralized brain responses whereas concrete words were associated with more symmetric hemispheric responses (Neville et al., 1992) or even greater right hemisphere activation (Binder et al., 2005) as predicted by…”
Temperature perceptions as a ground for social proximity (2010, background): “Mahon and Caramazza (2008) argue that sensorimotor activation as a functionof human thought is not irrelevant, but serves as an ‘ornament’.”