Psychscientists have a great post up proposing an acid test for genuine embodied cognition versus the all to popular “x body part alters y internal process” trope. Seriously- check it out!
Embodied cognition: A field spotter’s guide
Question 1: Does the paper claim to be an example of embodied cognition?
If yes, it is probably not embodied cognition. I’ve never been entirely sure why this is, but work that is actually about embodiment rarely describes itself as such. I think it’s because embodiment is the label that’s emerged to describe work from a variety of disciplines that, at the time, wasn’t about pushing any coherent agenda, and so the work often didn’t know at the time that it was embodied cognition.
This of course is less true now embodiment is such a hot topic, so what else do I look for?
Question 2: What is the key psychological process involved in solving the task?
Embodied cognition is, remember, the radical hypothesis that we solve tasks using resources spanning our brain, bodies and environments coupled together via perception. If the research you are reading is primarily investigating a process that doesn’t extend beyond the brain (e.g. a mental number line, or a thought about the future) then it isn’t embodiment. For example, in the leaning to the left example, the suggestion was that we estimate the magnitude of things by placing them on a mental number line, and that the way we are leaning makes different parts of that number line easier to access than others (e.g. leaning left makes the smaller numbers more accessible). The key process is the mental number line, which resides solely in the brain and is hypothesised to exist to solve a problem (estimating the magnitude of things) in a manner that doesn’t require anything other than a computing brain. This study is therefore not about embodiment.
Question 3: What is the embodied bit doing?
There’s a related question that comes up, then. In papers that aren’t actually doing embodied cognition, the body and the environment only have minor, subordinate roles. Leaning to the left merely biases our access to the mental number line; thinking about the future has a minor effect on bodily sway. The important bit is still the mental stuff – the cognitive process presumably implemented solely in the brain. If the non-neural or non-cognitive elements are simply being allowed to tweak some underlying mental process, rather than play a critical role in solving the task, it’s not embodiment.