Embodied goal pursuit

摘要

Daum, Sommerville, and Prinz propose that the interrelation between the symbolic and embodied system needs moreresearch attention. The proposal is based on the observation that human infants start out with embodied processes tounderstand the actions of others, and that these processes allow them to communicate with other people surprisingly well.What does the symbolic (language) system add to an infant's communication when it becomes available to the infantaround the end of the first year of life? Because the embodied versus the symbolic system are potentially dissociable andcan yield different perception and interpretation of the same social behavior, the study of whether and how embodied andsymbolic understanding is coordinated seems crucial. The authors suggest that the interaction between the embodiedand symbolic systems can best be studied by analyzing how the bi-directional relation of the two systems affects social-cognitive development, as the infant becomes a mature social agent. Specifically, they propose to investigate the extent towhich the embodied and the symbolic systems work together, impede each other, or are independent in affecting socialcommunication and thus a person's social-cognitive development.