I adopt a radical embodied viewpoint arguing that our cognition was primarily dedicated to the control of our body in order to properly interact with our surrounding environment (Wilson, 2002). Accordingly, my main goal is to better understand how the cognitive processes could be influenced by the peculiar nature of our physical body.

For the last 5 years, I mainly focus on the nature of knowledge. Indeed, it is assumed that our knowledge about objects, especially manipulable ones (e.g., an apple, a fork), could integrate knowledge about actions usually performed with them (e.g., Barsalou, 2008). I especially used a specific paradigm known as a “stimulus-responses-compatibility paradigm” in which the goal was to induce a compatibility/incompatibility between the presented stimulus (manipulated on some components) and the response performed (also manipulated on some components). Altogether, the gathered data point toward several interesting issues. Among them, one is the need to better understand how humans were informed about their own body and especially how they are able to construct a spatial representation of their own body.

Accordingly, I currently work on the development of a new experimental protocol. Its goal was to study how humans were able to use the sensory signals coming from their body in action, signals usually known as “sensory feedbacks”. Indeed, it seems that such feedbacks are of a primary relevance to construct an on-line spatial representation of the body (a kind of “body schema in action”; e.g., Blanke, 2012; Hommel et al., 2001). In fine, my goal was to understand how a change in the nature of sensory feedbacks could change the spatial body representation and in turn how this altered representation could alter cognitive processes involved in the perception, the attention and the memory.

 

References

Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617-645.

Blanke, O. (2012). Multisensory brain mechanisms of bodily self-consciousness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 13(8), 556.

Hommel, B., Müsseler, J., Aschersleben, G., & Prinz, W. (2001). The theory of event coding (TEC): A framework for perception and action planning. Behavioral and brain sciences, 24(5), 849-878.

Wilson, M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9(4), 625-636.