Embodied cognition
Related papers: 20
About
Embodied cognition is a theoretical framework holding that intelligence and cognitive processes are not confined to the brain alone but are fundamentally shaped by an agent's physical body and its dynamic interactions with the environment. Rather than treating the mind as an abstract information processor, embodied cognition emphasizes that perception, reasoning, and learning emerge from the continuous loop between bodily action and environmental feedback. In robotics and AI, this principle drives the design of systems that learn through physical interaction rather than purely symbolic computation. Robots like the iCub humanoid platform are explicitly built to explore how a body's sensorimotor capabilities scaffold the development of higher-level skills such as language, social understanding, and manipulation. Embodied approaches also underpin socially assistive robots, evolutionary robotics, and multimodal language models grounded in real-world perception. This framework matters because it offers a more biologically plausible and practically effective path to general intelligence. Systems designed with embodied principles tend to be more adaptive, robust, and capable of natural human interaction—qualities essential for robots operating in complex, unstructured real-world environments.
Top Researchers
Top Institutes
Top Cited Papers
How the Body Shapes the Mind
Shaun Gallagher
Citations: 3049 • 2005
How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence
Rolf Pfeifer, Josh Bongard
Citations: 1024 • 2006
Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and Computer Representations
William J. Clancey
Citations: 910 • 1997
How the Body Shapes the Way We Think
Rolf Pfeifer, Josh Bongard
Citations: 894 • 2006
Your Robot Therapist Will See You Now: Ethical Implications of Embodied Artificial Intelligence in Psychiatry, Psychology, and Psychotherapy
Amelia Fiske, Peter Henningsen, Alena Buyx
Citations: 767 • 2019
Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents
Fei Xia, Amir Zamir, Zhiyang He, Alexander F. Sax, Jitendra Malik, Silvio Savarese
Citations: 714 • 2018
Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science
Andy Clark
Citations: 630 • 2000
Being There
Andy Clark
Citations: 554 • 1996
The iCub humanoid robot
Giorgio Metta, Giulio Sandini, David Vernon, Lorenzo Natale, Francesco Nori
Citations: 551 • 2008
Are physically embodied social agents better than disembodied social agents?: The effects of physical embodiment, tactile interaction, and people's loneliness in human–robot interaction
Kwan Min Lee, Younbo Jung, Jaywoo Kim, Sang Ryong Kim
Citations: 492 • 2006
A Socially Assistive Robot Exercise Coach for the Elderly
Juan Fasola, Maja Matarić
Citations: 420 • 2013
Anthropomorphic Interactions with a Robot and Robot–like Agent
Sara Kiesler, Aaron Powers, Susan R. Fussell, Cristen Torrey
Citations: 409 • 2008
PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model
Danny Driess, Fei Xia, Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi, Corey Lynch, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Brian Ichter, Ayzaan Wahid, Jonathan Tompson, Quan Vuong, Tianhe Yu, Wenlong Huang, Yevgen Chebotar, Pierre Sermanet, Daniel Duckworth, Sergey Levine, Vincent Vanhoucke, Karol Hausman, Marc Toussaint, Klaus Greff, Andy Zeng, Igor Mordatch, Pete Florence
Citations: 350 • 2023
Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step
Michael Wheeler
Citations: 346 • 2005
Embodied Symbol Emergence Based on Mimesis Theory
Tetsunari Inamura, Iwaki Toshima, H. Tanie, Yoshihiko Nakamura
Citations: 328 • 2004
Embodied Cognition
Lawrence Shapiro
Citations: 323 • 2010
Mapping Information Flow in Sensorimotor Networks
Max Lungarella, Olaf Sporns
Citations: 304 • 2006
Pay attention!
Daniel Szafır, Bilge Mutlu
Citations: 300 • 2012
REVERIE: Remote Embodied Visual Referring Expression in Real Indoor Environments
Yuankai Qi, Qi Wu, Peter Anderson, Xin Wang, William Yang Wang, Chunhua Shen, Anton van den Hengel
Citations: 297 • 2020
Hand synergies: Integration of robotics and neuroscience for understanding the control of biological and artificial hands
Marco Santello, Matteo Bianchi, Marco Gabiccini, Emiliano Ricciardi, Gionata Salvietti, Domenico Prattichizzo, Marc O. Ernst, Alessandro Moscatelli, Henrik Jörntell, Astrid M. L. Kappers, Kostas J. Kyriakopoulos, Alin Albu‐Schäffer, Claudio Castellini, Antonio Bicchi
Citations: 297 • 2016