Arne Weber

Mit ihrem Aufsatz The Extended Mind und der zentralen These, dass „[c]ognitive processes ain’t (all) in the head!“, sorgten Andy Clark und David Chalmers 1998 für großes Aufsehen. Im Anschluss an die kontrovers, aber zunächst nur englischsprachig geführte Debatte erschien nun der erste deutsche Sammelband zu diesem Thema. Jan G. Michel, Kim J. Boström und Michael Pohl präsentieren in Folge der von ihnen organisierten Tagung einen ergänzenden wie auch durchweg kritischen Sammelband zu der bisher noch nicht abgeschlossenen Diskussion. Es wurden Beiträge der zuvor gehaltenen Vorträge wie auch neue, neutral begutachtete Texte zusammengestellt, um zusätzliche Perspektiven auf die Behauptung von Clark und Chalmers zu eröffnen.

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 con- tradictory theories using similar terms for different mechanisms and different terms for similar mecha- nisms. 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 forma- tion within and between different disciplines. Here we provide a systematic comparison of current mod- els 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 metatheoret- ical 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.

In this paper we discuss an approach called grounded action cognition, which aims to provide a theory of the interdependencies between motor control and action-related cognitive processes, like perceiving an action or thinking about an action. The theory contrasts with traditional views in cognitive science in that it motivates an understanding of cognition as embodied, through application of Barsalou’s general idea of grounded cognition. To guide further research towards an appropriate theory of grounded action cognition we distinguish between grounding qua acquisition and grounding qua constitution. On this basis, we distinguish three possible theoretical conceptions of grounded action cognition. In addition to these methodological and conceptual analyses, we draw on recent empirical evidence to motivate our inclination towards a particular theory. According to this theory certain representations are involved in action cognition and action perception that are not modality-specific as usually proposed by advocates of grounded cognition. Further, the evidence is in favor of our more specific theory stating that for some cognitive abilities, some motor abilites are constitutive