From action to language: Evidence and speculations

The semantic, syntactic and phonetic structures of language develop from a complex preexisting system, more specifically the preexisting motor system. Language thus emerged as an external physical expression of the neural basis for movement control. Features which made a wide range of skilled action possible -a set of elementary motor subprograms together with rules expressed in neural organization for combining subprograms into extended action sequences -were transferred to form a parallel set of programs and rules for speech and language. The already established integration of motor control with perceptual organization l e d directly to a systematic relation between language and the externally perceived world.

European Journal of Social Psychology, 2009

Daum, Sommerville, and Prinz propose that the interrelation between the symbolic and embodied system needs more research attention. The proposal is based on the observation that human infants start out with embodied processes to understand 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 infant around the end of the first year of life? Because the embodied versus the symbolic system are potentially dissociable and can yield different perception and interpretation of the same social behavior, the study of whether and how embodied and symbolic understanding is coordinated seems crucial. The authors suggest that the interaction between the embodied and symbolic systems can best be studied by analyzing how the bi-directional relation of the two systems affects socialcognitive development, as the infant becomes a mature social agent. Specifically, they propose to investigate the extent to which the embodied and the symbolic systems work together, impede each other, or are independent in affecting social communication and thus a person's social-cognitive development.

A new perspective on cognition views cortical cell assemblies linking together knowledge about actions and perceptions not only as the vehicles of integrated action and perception processing but, furthermore, as a brain basis for a wide range of higher cortical functions, including attention, meaning and concepts, sequences, goals and intentions, and even communicative social interaction. This article explains mechanisms relevant to mechanistic action perception theory, points to concrete neuronal circuits in brains along with artificial neuronal network simulations, and summarizes recent brain imaging and other experimental data documenting the role of action perception circuits in cognition, language and communication.

The idea of hierarchical organisation in the motor system has a long history, but the different components of the hierarchy have not been easy to localise in the human brain.

The cognitive neuroscience of social behavior, 2005

Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, 2021

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty's original account of "higher-order" cognition as fundamentally embodied and enacted. Merleau-Ponty's philosophy inspired theories that deemphasize overlaps between conceptual knowledge and motor intentionality or, on the contrary, focus exclusively on abstract thought. In contrast, this paper explores the link between Merleau-Ponty's account of motor intentionality and his interpretations of our capacity to understand and interact productively with cultural symbolic systems. I develop my interpretation based on Merleau-Ponty's analysis of two neuropathological modifications of motor intentionality, the case of the braininjured war veteran Schneider, and a neurological disorder known as Gerstmann's syndrome. Building on my analysis of Schneider's sensorimotor compensatory performances in relation to his limitations in the domains of algebra, geometry, and language usage, I demonstrate a strong continuity between the sense of embodiment and enaction at all these levels. Based on Merleau-Ponty's interpretations, I argue that "higher-order" cognition is impaired in Schneider insofar as his injury limits his sensorimotor capacity to dynamically produce comparatively more complex differentiations of any given phenomenal structure. I then show how Merleau-Ponty develops and specifies his interpretation of Schneider's intellectual difficulties in relation to the ambiguous role of the body, and in particular the hand, in Gerstmann's syndrome. I explain how Merleau-Ponty defends the idea that sensorimotor and quasi-representational cognition are mutually irreducible, while maintaining that symbol-based cognition is a fundamentally enactive and embodied process.

Motor control

In analyses of the motor system, two hierarchies are often posited: The first – the action hierarchy – is a decomposition of an action into sub-actions and sub-sub-actions. The second – the control hierarchy – is a postulated hierarchy in the neural control processes that are supposed to bring about the action. A general assumption in cognitive neuroscience is that these two hierarchies are internally consistent and provide complementary descriptions of neuronal control processes. In this essay, we suggest that neither offers a complete explanation and that they cannot be reconciled in a logical or conceptually coherent way. Furthermore, neither pays proper attention to the dynamics and temporal aspects of neural control processes. We will explore an alternative hierarchical organization in which causality is inherent in the dynamics over time. Specifically, high levels of the hierarchy encode more stable (goal-related) representations, while lower levels represent more transient (actions and motor acts) kinematics. If employed properly, a hierarchy based on this latter principle of temporal extension is not subject to the problems that plague the traditional accounts.

Synthese, 2022

People walk, build, paint and otherwise act together with a purpose in myriad ways. What is the relation between the actions people perform in acting together with a purpose and the outcome, or outcomes, to which their actions are directed? We argue that fully characterising this relation will require appeal not only to intention, knowledge and other familiar philosophical paraphernalia but also to another kind of representation involved in preparing and executing actions, namely motor representation. If we are right, motor representation plays a central role in the story of acting together.

Complex human behavior is organized around temporally distal outcomes. Behavioral studies based on tasks such as normal prehension, multi-step object use and imitation establish the existence of relative hierarchies of motor control. The retrieval errors in apraxia also support the notion of a hierarchical model for representing action in the brain. In this review, three functional brain imaging studies of action observation using the method of repetition suppression are used to identify a putative neural architecture that supports action understanding at the level of kinematics, object centered goals and ultimately, motor outcomes. These results, based on observation, may match a similar functional-anatomic hierarchy for action planning and execution. If this is true, then the findings support a functional-anatomic model that is distributed across a set of interconnected brain areas that are differentially recruited for different aspects of goal-oriented behavior, rather than a homogeneous mirror neuron system for organizing and understanding all behavior. Ó 2007 Published by Elsevier B.V.