Abstract
What if mental simulation is not just a way to discuss and to solve problems, but also an essential aspect of brain functioning? Indeed, what if this process lies at the very foundation of our ability to understand other peoples’ intentions and emotions, to remember past events, to create new ideas, and to imagine the future? A growing body of cognitive science literature on human “mental simulation” capacity points to the cogency of this view. The present chapter begins by examining a particular kind of model, i.e. “mental models”, to more closely investigate the relation between simulation and cognition.
Music is a horizontal force that unfolds in time.
Leon Fleisher (American pianist and conductor)
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Notes
- 1.
Auditory, olfactory, and tactile mental models have also been studied. In particular, Halpern (1988) used experiments similar to those of Kosslyn to investigate the mental scanning of auditory images produces by familiar songs. Visual mental models, however, have been the most widely studied.
- 2.
A radical version of the embodied cognition view, influenced by dynamical systems theory and by ecological psychology, actually denies the existence of mental representations (Chemero 2009). Most proponents of embodied cognition, however, continue to view representational states as being fundamental to a theory of cognition.
- 3.
Barsalou calls his approach grounded cognition, as he believes that the term embodied cognition places too much emphasis on the role of the body in cognition, and that cognition can be grounded in many ways, including through simulation and situated actions, not only through body states.
- 4.
In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphors are usually written in capital letters to distinguish them from corresponding expressions in everyday language.
- 5.
Several psycholinguistics studies (see Fischer and Zwaan 2008, for a review) have examined the role of perceptual and motor simulation in the comprehension of literal, and thus non-metaphorical, language.
- 6.
The difference between superficial and deep processing is crucial in instructional contexts and will be examined in reference to simulation, in Chap. 7.
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Landriscina, F. (2013). Simulation and Cognition. In: Simulation and Learning. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1954-9_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1954-9_2
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