And The Theory Of Cognitive Thinking

Since1980, a rise of interest in embodied cognition has had a strong interdisciplinary flavor, with contributions from philosophy, cognitive anthropology, cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology, and robotics, among other disciplines. As a new trend and research paradigm,embodied cognition focus on the role the body(physical structure、physical state and sensory-motor representation)、the environment and the mind play in cognition. Meanwhile it stresses that cognition in nature is situated, dynamic, enactive as well as grounded.Embodied cognition, situated cognition, enactive cognition and grounded cognition share a certain ideas:as to the theme, they all take the environment、the body、the mind as trinity and insist that cognition is situated and the environment (the physical and the social) will alter the cognition,and that the physical body itself、its state and the sensory-motor experiences shape the cognition; as to the methodological issues, they all adopt dynamical method, which integrates the natural and the experimental research together. With the help of the mechanism of "coupling" researchers can carry out their cognitive studies successfully. In spite of the commons these four related cognition theories have, they still differ from each other,for example, each of them stresses on different points and has its own methods respectively.Embodied cognition,without any doubt, has been a hot topic in the field of different disciplines and its emergence is attributed to its profound philosophical and psychological foundation.Both of the western philosophy and the Chinese traditional philosophy give birth to it.In detail, Nietzsche who is the first person put forward "set the body free" discussed a lot about the importance of body in understanding the world in his literature and Merleau-Ponty talked a lot about the way how the body determined cognition; additionally, Chinese traditional philosophy of "body and mind comes together" sets a firm foundation for embodied cognition.Meanwhile Piaget’s cognitive theory along with Vygotsky’s socio-historical theory also provide psychological basis for embodied cognition.One more thing, the development of the first generation of the cognition advances the second generation of the cognition--embodied cognition.Now researches on embodied cognition have not been confined in academic study; instead, more and more empirical researches on embodied cognition has been underway, with a body of fruitful achievements. Now many scholars has confirmed that human sensory-perception experience, emotion and behavior are related to the body. In detail, physical experience not only has an effect on the individual cognition but on emotion; touch experience will facilitate a positive evaluation of the toucher and increase the probability of complying behavior.According to the model in the western countries, I made a little change and tried to further investigate that the initiation of touch would increase the affective reactions to the experimenter. Graduate students whose major is not psychology are selected as subjects.Under the guises of testing the subjects blood pressure, the experimenter tries to make body contact with the subjects. After that, the subjects should press different buttons according to the vocabulary words (positive or negative words).The results show that:subjects react totally differently to the positive words in the touch conditiont;the inter play between gender and touch condition is significant; but the main effects of gender,touch condition and their inter play are not obvious to the negative words.Two important conclusions can be drawn from this research:(1) body contact can enhance likability between the two touchers,(2) and the effect is even significant between the women than the men, but men are not disgusted with body touch as expected.As to the mechanism of the effect of embodied cognition, scholars offer multiple interpretations for it, such as neural biology perspective, genetic epistemology perspective, cognitive linguistics perspective, evolutionary psychology perspective and socio-historical theory. Mirror Neurons are the key element to understand the mechanism of embodied cognition from neural biology perspective; theory of Piaget’s Genetic Epistemology tries to explain embodied cognition based on ’action internalization’; linguistics language insists that metaphor can provide support for it; evolutionary psychology states that embodied effects should trace back to evolutionary factors; the theory of cultural mediation and internalization empasizes the importantce of environment especially the social environment in shaping cognition.Embodied cognition pays more attention to the significance of the body playing in cognition,and its behavior researches not only generate new directions for study but improve the ecological validity of traditional cognitive psychology. However, these theories of embodied cognition have not become a major force in explaining cognition, and the major reason is previous accounts have had troubles dealing with certain classes of criticism. For example, embodiment theories benefited and suffered a wealth of different and often incompatible ideas about who and what it is, scholars worry that embodiment theories advocate regression to behaviorism, that observed mind-body relationships are epiphenomenal rather than causal, and that they are not totally different from the classical cognitive paradigm.Researches on embodied cognition in the future should deal well with its challenges on the one hand, and on other hand how to make a good dialogue with Chinese culture is a very important issue.