Grounded cognition offers a natural framework for
studying categories that lie at the interface of cognition and action.
From this perspective, cognition emerges from the coupling of the
brain, the modalities, the body, and the environment. Situated action,
in particular, links these domains together, as perceived entities and
events in the world (e.g., hedonic stimuli, social agents) trigger
self-relevant responses (e.g., goals, values, identities, norms),
which in turn produce bodily states (e.g., affect, motivation) that
initiate actions (e.g., bodily actions, vocalizations) and ultimately
produce outcomes, again in the world (e.g., reward, punishment). Ad
hoc and goal-derived categories emerge between the internal cognitive
states and external physical states that arise during the pursuit of
situated action. Although these categories behave similarly in some
ways to conventional taxonomic categories (e.g., possessing graded
structure), they differ in others, especially in their dependence on
context (typically contexts of situated action). On many occasions,
these categories are constructed to support current situated action
(ad hoc categories), but when they become relevant to situated action
across many occasions, they become well-established in memory
(goal-derived categories). Across these categories, ideals play
central roles in determining graded structure, supporting the goals
that drive situated action. Event frames offer a natural means of
understanding how ad hoc and goal-derived categories become
constructed compositionally, and how they offer an interface between
cognition and the world, essentially providing coordinated patterns of
values for instantiating frame variables. Interestingly, this
frame-based account can be naturally implemented in the simulation
mechanisms of perceptual symbol systems, further grounding ad hoc
categories in relations between the brain, modalities, body, and world
during situated action.
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