page_title: Embodied cognition
section_title: Perspective
hierarchical_section_title: Embodied cognition / Psychology / Perspective
caption_attribution_description: English: Graph depicting results from Tversky and Hard's (2009) experiment.
context_page_description: Embodied cognition is the theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of the entire body of the organism. The features of cognition include high level mental constructs and performance on various cognitive tasks. The aspects of the body include the motor system, the perceptual system, bodily interactions with the environment, and the assumptions about the world that are built into the structure of the organism.
  The embodied mind thesis challenges other theories, such as cognitivism, computationalism, and Cartesian dualism.
  It is closely related to the extended mind thesis, situated cognition, and enactivism. The modern version depends on insights drawn from recent research in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, dynamical systems, artificial intelligence, robotics, animal cognition, plant cognition and neurobiology.
context_section_description: Researchers have found that when making judgements about objects in photographs, people will take the perspective of a person in the picture instead of their own.
  They showed college undergraduate participants 1 of 3 photographs and asked where 1 object in the picture was compared to the other object.  For example, if the 2 objects were an apple and a banana, the participants would have to respond to a question about the location of the apple compared to the banana. The photographs either had no person, a person looking at the object, in this case the banana, or a person reaching for the banana. The photograph and question appeared in a larger set of questionnaires not related to the study.
  Results show that participants who viewed photographs that included a person were significantly more likely to respond from another's perspective than those who saw photographs with no person.  There were no differences in perspective of responses for the person looking versus reaching.  Participants who saw the scene without a person were significantly more likely to respond from their own perspective.  This means that the presence of a person in the photograph affected the perspective used even though the question focused solely on the two objects.  The researchers state that these results suggest disembodied cognition, in which the participants put themselves into the body of the person in the photograph.
caption: Graph depicting the percentage of responses by perspective for each photograph condition.
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