Florida psychology professor views cognition as more than the brain

Psychology increasingly characterizes cognition as the process of an individual acting in the environment in which he or she develops, instead of a kind of computational processing of information in the brain. 

Psychologists use the terms embodiment or embeddedness to describe this approach.

An August opinion piece by Robert Lickliter in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience reviews the state of embodiment research and its importance across disciplines. Lickliter is a professor of psychology at Florida International University. His starting point is a July article by V. Lux et al. in the same journal that presented a developmental framework for embodiment research that can be used by different research areas.

Lickliter focuses on two developmental themes, including "how to account for the stability and variability of developmental outcomes," and how constraints "can contribute to a fuller understanding of the developmental dynamics of embodiment."

Beyond the brain

Lickliter explained in an interview how the embodiment approach differs from past views of cognition.

 "Traditional approaches in cognitive science, evident since the last third of the 20th Century, assert that all acts of cognition involve information processing in the brain similar to what digital computers do," he said. "In this view cognitive activity consists of brain-based mechanisms that operate on some of form of internally stored information that intercedes between sensory inputs and behavioral, motor outputs."

He characterized the old approach as "neuro-centric internalism." In its place, Lickliter said, the embodiment approach "proposes that the dynamics of an organism acting in real time, engaged with its real world context is the best grounding for understanding what is cognition. In other words, to understand behavior and cognition, we need to appreciate that a brain, in a body, situated in a physical, biological, and social environment is the minimum unit of analysis."


This new approach has the advantage of being interdisciplinary, "bringing together researchers from different fields and using different levels of analysis to better understand the origins of knowledge from an activity-based, experiential perspective," he said. 

Lickliter emphasized that the new framework extends "the boundaries of what counts as cognitive activity beyond the brain."

The role of development 

The embodiment approach contributes to understanding the tendency of characteristics and traits to stay similar across generations, known as phenotypic stability. It also helps understanding as to how these traits may vary across individuals. 

Some variability occurs because developmental conditions don't always stay the same. As an example, Lickliter notes that rat pups who experienced "high levels of licking and grooming" after birth, were better able to deal with stress than those rat pups who had lower levels of maternal grooming. 

This observed stability across generations is because all phenotypes come out of individual development, Lickliter said, and the development process depends on both internal and external resources in each generation. Internal resources include "genes, molecular regulatory networks, cellular dynamics, endocrine products," he said, while external resources refer to the organism's "available nutrients, social interaction, temperature, etc."

"These resources and their temporal and spatial relations effectively regulate the relative stability of phenotypes observed across generations," the professor added.

As Lickliter explains in the article, "From a developmental point of view, the process responsible for phenotypic stability and the process responsible for phenotypic variability are one and the same, namely, the very process of development itself."

Constraints on development

Constraints on the process of development can also affect phenotypic outcomes. For example, constraints can close or open options for development, the way particular muscles and tendons might restrict or advance a specific motor activity. 

"Constraints are inherent in having a particular type of body in a particular type of environment (aquatic, terrestrial, arboreal)," Lickliter said. "Because bodies are made up of muscles, ligaments, tendons, bones, and because they move in gravity, only some forms of movement and action are possible. Others are not."

These limits on an organism's actions define how it can or cannot act in its specific environment. Further, Lickliter said, "since the brain and its connection to the body is a `history of its use,' an individual’s history of past action and activity will both guide and constrain its future action and activity (examples are habits, muscle memory, effects of `practice').

In summary, Lickliter sees the review paper by Lux et al. as providing a timely and "useful road map" for integrating the different disciplines involved in embodiment research.

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R. Lickliter, "Opinion: Advancing Embodiment Research From a Developmental Point of View," Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 20 August, 2021. DOI:  

10.3389/fnsys.2021.748335