Challenges and Opportunities for Grounding Cognition

Abstract

According to the grounded perspective, cognition emerges from the interaction of classic cognitive processes with the modalities, the body, and the environment. Rather than being an autonomous impenetrable module, cognition incorporates these other domains intrinsically into its operation. The Situated Action Cycle offers one way of understanding how the modalities, the body, and the environment become integrated to ground cognition. Seven challenges and opportunities are raised for this perspective: (1) How does cognition emerge from the Situated Action Cycle and in turn support it? (2) How can we move beyond simply equating embodiment with action, additionally establishing how embodiment arises in the autonomic, neuroendocrine, immune, cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, and integumentary systems? (3) How can we better understand the mechanisms underlying multimodal simulation, its functions across the Situated Action Cycle, and its integration with other representational systems? (4) How can we develop and assess theoretical accounts of symbolic processing from the grounded perspective (perhaps using the construct of simulators)? (5) How can we move beyond the simplistic distinction between concrete and abstract concepts, instead addressing how concepts about the external and internal worlds pattern to support the Situated Action Cycle? (6) How do individual differences emerge from different populations of situational memories as the Situated Action Cycle manifests itself differently across individuals? (7) How can constructs from grounded cognition provide insight into the replication and generalization crises, perhaps from a quantum perspective on mechanisms (as exemplified by simulators).

Keywords: Action; Categorisation; Embodied cognition; Emotion and cognition; Event cognition; Semantics.

Figure 1

Domains of grounded cognition. Cognition emerges from grounding classic cognitive mechanisms in the perceptual modalities, body, physical environment, and social environment.

Figure 2

The Situated Action Cycle. An idealized series of discrete linear phases is shown, together with an iterative loop (top) and a situational memory process (bottom). In actual operation, phases may be smeared across each other in time and/or omitted. Also, various loops and alternative relations between phases may emerge. This idealized representation simply illustrates the critical phases and their approximate statistical relations.

Figure 3

Illustration of how the Situated Action Cycle integrates the domains of grounded cognition. Panel A illustrates the five domains that underlie cognition in Figure 1: classic cognitive mechanisms (blue), the modalities (grey), the body (dark green), the physical and social environments (light green). Panel B illustrates the appearance of entities and events during the environmental phase of the cycle. Panel C illustrates perception of these entities and events via the modalities during the self-relevance phase, together with establishing their implications for the agent’s goals, values, identity, norms, etc. via cognitive processing. Panel D illustrates the resultant activation of emotion and motivation during the affect phase, often heavily expressed in the body. Panel E illustrates the production of behavior in the environment during the action phase, often resulting from emotion and motivation. Panel F illustrates the results of action during the outcome phase, including reward and assessments of prediction accuracy. As this figure illustrates overall, the Situated Action Cycle integrates the domains of grounded cognition, suggesting that these domains are important because, together, they implement the elements of situated action.