Towards a common framework of grounded action cognition: Relating motor control, perception and cognition

Highlights

• There is theoretical confusion on the relation between action and cognition.

• Widely used notions have both overlapping and contradictory implications.

• Existing accounts can be classified within a framework of grounded action cognition.

• Grounded action cognition increases comparability of related empirical research.

Abstract

The relation between motor control and action cognition – including action-related thoughts and action-related perception – has been subject to controversial discussions in the last three decades. During these decades, cognitive neuroscience has been increasingly confronted with a huge variety of different accounts trying to understand and explain the relation between these systems, their interdependencies and the mediating mechanisms by establishing notions such as “internal models”, “simulation” or “shared representation”. These accounts, however, include a large array of partly overlapping, partly contradictory theories using similar terms for different mechanisms and different terms for similar mechanisms. In the absence of a systematic work-up and comparison, this array of accounts and theories leads to confusion in the field, duplication of experimental work, and unconnected parallelism of theory formation within and between different disciplines. Here we provide a systematic comparison of current models and prospective theories that deal with the relation between cognition, perception and motor control mechanisms. In a second step, we propose “grounded action cognition” as a comprehensive metatheoretical framework which defines different hypothetical possibilities of the relations between these domains, offers systematic insights into current models and theories and last but not least may help to increase comparability of empirical research in the domain of action and action cognition.

Introduction

There is a long tradition and interest in many different disciplines on the interplay between action and perception. This interest is led by various aims: while some disciplines investigate this interplay with the aim of understanding human ‘cognitive mechanisms’ (cognitive psychology, philosophy), brain mechanisms (cognitive neuroscience) or neurologic and psychiatric diseases (neurology/psychiatry), others study this relation to model skillful movements (robotics) or perceptual abilities (computational and mathematical neuroscience). Some of these traditions date back to 19th century experimental psychology and philosophical theory of voluntary action (James, 1890/1981). Others were developed more recently. For example, approaches from computational and cognitive neuroscience, starting in the early 1990s, aim at describing the precise brain systems and neuronal dynamics underlying the action–perception inter-linkage by means of internal forward/generative models (Friston et al., 2010, Wolpert and Miall, 1996). The focus on the linkage between action and perception has now been expanded to include also conceptual abilities and cognition in general. Specifically, growing interdisciplinary work has now begun to relate different theoretical approaches and empirical findings to explain also higher-cognitive skills like mind reading in social contexts (Gallese & Goldman, 1998) or mental imagery (Grush, 2004).

Here we take an interdisciplinary point of departure with the aim to provide a systematic comparison of current and established theoretical models and prospective theories that deal with the relation between cognition, perception and motor control mechanisms. We will in particular focus on the proposed internal representational mechanisms governing mutual relations between perception and action. Accordingly, the selection criterion for the theories to be compared in the present paper is that they make some substantial claim about the systematic connection between the domains of cognition, perception and motor control.¹ It is beyond the scope of the present endeavor to also take dynamic interactions between mind/brain, body and world into account as proposed by some more radical conceptions of embodied cognition (for an overview compare Shapiro, 2011; or Wilson, 2002; for certain conceptions of these radical or dynamic views see Beer, 1995, Hutto and Myin, 2013, Keijzer, 2002). Thus, we will here specifically consider internal representations that appear to draw on motor-related processes. We will use the term ‘grounding’ to refer to the general relation between motor processes and action perception/cognition, which seems underdetermined so far in current theories. Please also note that it is not our aim to provide a systematic review of those single theories in terms of supporting or challenging empirical evidence (for a recent review see, for example, Engel, Maye, Kurthen, & König, 2013). Instead, we here aim to systematically compare the empirical and explanatory foci those theories adopt with respect to the nature of the relation between motor control and action–cognition.

This paper comprises three sections. The first provides a brief overview of different action theories and suggests a classification by target mechanisms. In the second section, we introduce a framework that will be used to illustrate our notion of grounded action cognition as a metatheoretical view. Third and finally, our purpose is to show how existing theories can or cannot be classified into genuine grounding theories. This new classification scheme shall offer new perspectives into commonalities and differences as well as the explanatory scope with respect to the degree to which perceptual and cognitive abilities genuinely draw on motor capacities; however, it is not meant to suggest an evaluation of existing and established theories concerning their theoretical and empirical adequacy.