Opening doors for new research questions: On simulatability

摘要

In his rich and thought provoking article, Zwaan convincingly argues for giving the embodiment perspective a chancebefore taking a defeatist attitude. The current research on embodied cognition definitely leads to an explosion ofstimulating findings and psychological models. One advantage of the most prominent views is the assumption of onesingle representational structure. In a nutshell, the embodiment view assumes modal representations as therepresentational medium (see Barsalou, 1999; Zwaan, 2004), and one simple underlying process: Simulation of acertain event in some bodily way. Because from the perspective of such models comprehension naturally affordssimulation of bodily or sensory states, close links between experiential stimulation and evaluation (such as in the penstudy; Strack, Martin & Stepper, 1988) and semantics and behavior (e.g., Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996) come as nosurprise.