具身视角下的社会认知

摘 要：由于第一代认知科学存在着身心剥离的缺憾，具身化作为第二代认知科学的主要特征得到研究者的广泛关注，并且得到了来自神经科学领域的支持。随着研究的深入，具身学派提出，社会认知是否也应是具身的。现有研究发现具身性对个体评价、反应速度、言语理解、人际交往等方面都有不小的作用。但上述以身体模拟为主的证据仍不足以证明社会认知是具身的，具身学派还需解决诸如明确具身的定义、实验论证、明显区别于传统认知观等问题。

The Embodiment of Social Cognition

For decades, the reigning paradigm of cognitive science has been classicism. Psychologists depict the interaction between human and environment mainly on the basis of model of information processing. In other words, the classical cognitivists (CC) believe cognition can be calculated. CC claims that mental operations are largely detached from the working of the body, the body being merely an out put device for commands generated by abstract symbols in the mind. While these classical beliefs are contradicted by embodied cognitivism (EC). EC argues that our body (including the brain) is also involved in cognitive activities and plays an important role. As the classical cognitive science has some problems can’t be solved, like complex cognitive activities involved emotion, subjective experience, then, embodiment, the most significant character of the embodied cognitive science, has been prevalent among the researches and has got the evidence from neuron science. Mirror neurons are reckoned as the essence of empathy and mimicry of expression, as the experiments from monkey and human being per se. Furthermore, they can arouse emotion reactivation during and after experiencing one situation. With the developing of embodied researches, the researchers found that even the position of our body or the movement of our head do influence our cognitive activities, like evaluation, memory, speed of words sorting, etc. Though the scholars who boast embodied cognition argued that whether social cognition is embodied, there have been a lot of studies in embodied social cognition and achieved some revolutionary results. These approaches are mainly about three fields: attitude, social perception and emotion. However, the approaches above which are mainly focused on body mimicry can’t be the crucial evidence to demonstrate the embodiment of social cognition. Then the scholars have to define what kind of social cognitive activities can be counted into the embodiment, like person recognition, personality perception, social beliefs, social mechanisms, mindreading, social attitudes, social interaction. A few studies about mindreading and communication with embodied methods give us premising results. EC has been widely accepted in schools, while, to promote future development of the EC approach, scholars still need to answer the following questions. First, which interpretation of embodiment do they have in mind? Second, which sectors of cognition, or which cognitive activities, do they say are embodied; and how fully does each task involve embodiment? Third, how does the empirical evidence support the specific embodiment claims under the selected interpretations? Fourth, how do the proffered claims depart substantially from CC?