A growing body of data has been gathered in support of the view that the mind is embodied and that cognition is grounded in sensory-motor processes. Some researchers have gone so far as to claim that this paradigm poses a serious challenge to central tenets of cognitive science, including the widely held view that the mind can be analyzed in terms of abstract computational principles. On the ot...

Embodied cognition pertains to the consequences on thought and emotion of living with our particular human sensory and motor systems. The consequences are quite varied, and researchers across the cognitive sciences have made great discoveries in line with this principle. However, while we offer this principle, it is necessarily broad, and searching for a single unifying theme has not brought re...

Abstract A popular trend in the sciences of mind is to understand cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, ecological, and so on. While some work under label “embodied cognition” takes for granted key commitments traditional cognitive science, other projects coincide treating embodiment starting point an entirely different way investigating all cognition. Focusing on latter, this paper discus...

This essay proposes and defends a pluralistic theory of conceptual embodiment. Our concepts are represented in at least two ways: (i) through sensorimotor simulations of our interactions with objects and events and (ii) through sensorimotor simulations of natural language processing. Linguistic representations are "dis-embodied" in the sense that they are dynamic and multimodal but, in contrast...

An overview of our work on evaluating an affective embodied agent within a nutritional scenario (over extended periods of interaction) is provided. Results from an investigation into how subjects respond to the agent’s emotional expressions are also detailed, with a particular focus on how subjects respond to mismatched emotional expressions (e.g. a happy face with a concerned voice).

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) are poised to constitute a specific category within persuasive systems, in particular through their ability to support affective dialogue. One possible approach consists in using ECA as virtual coaches or personal assistants and to make persuasion part of a dialogue game implementing specific argumentation or negotiation features. In this paper, we explore a...