Interdisciplinary approaches to embodied cognition research

This chapter offers an overview on the bidirectional enrichment between the cognitive science of embodied cognition and other disciplines. First, the dynamic discourse between philosophy and embodied cognition is presented to convey mutual theoretical developments. Then, comparative psychology is described as a fruitful experimental domain to inform about the crucial role of organism-environment interaction in the evolution of adaptive behaviours during phylogeny. Third, the anthropological approach is introduced to inform about the influence of culturally determined learning on cognition during ontogeny. In the end, the field of robotics is briefly discussed to highlight how perception of the body constitutes a fundamental framework for extracting information from the world, and thus for the development of neural structures responsible for cognition and learning.