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Embodied cognition and its significance for education

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TRE0010.1177/1477878518822149Theory and Research in EducationShapiro and Stolz

Article
TRE
Theory and Research in Education

Embodied cognition and its

2019, Vol. 17(1) 19­–39
© The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
significance for education sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1477878518822149
https://doi.org/10.1177/1477878518822149
journals.sagepub.com/home/tre

Lawrence Shapiro
University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA

Steven A. Stolz
La Trobe University, Australia

Abstract
Psychology has made, and continues to make, a significant contribution to the discipline area
of education. Since one of the main aims of education concerns student learning – which is
an indisputably psychological phenomenon – we argue that the emerging research agenda
of embodied cognition has much to offer educational practitioners, researchers, and/or
policy-makers. Although embodied cognition is still in its infancy, the multidisciplinary and
interdisciplinary nature of the literature provides some thought-provoking recommendations to
enhance educational practice or practices, which in turn can bring about student learning more
effectively. Consequently, this article will be concerned with the discussion of two issues: first, we
provide a brief historical overview that foregrounds embodied cognition, and, second, we outline
the educational implications of embodied cognition through the use of some examples significant
to education. We conclude with an argument for the importance of making findings in an area we
call ‘embodied education’ available to teachers.

Keywords
Cognition, education, educational research, embodied cognition, learning, psychology

Introduction
Most would agree that in a broad sense education involves learning, comprises learners,
is associated with the intentional activity of teaching, and is closely linked with clearly
demarcated spatiotemporal educational settings, such as schools and universities. Taking
into consideration some psychologists’ interest in learners and learning from the early

Corresponding author:
Steven A. Stolz, La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC 3086, Australia.
Email: s.stolz@latrobe.edu.au
20 Theory and Research in Education 17(1)

twentieth-century onward, particularly within educational contexts (e.g. Thorndike,

1910), it is not too hard to see how cognitivist or behavioral schools of thought have in
turn influenced theories of learning in educational discourse and practice. In the former
case, cognitivist views of learning are basically concerned with internal mental factors
that influence cognition, such as how we organize and reorganize our thinking as a result
of our experiences in the world (Piaget, 1960 [1926], 1950 [1947]), whereas in the latter
case, behavioral accounts of learning are generally concerned with external factors, such
as the identification of positive and negative reinforcements for certain types of behav-
iors (Skinner, 1965, 1968). The strengths and limitations of both these accounts are vari-
ous; however, our intention at this juncture is to elucidate how each has failed to
understand the role our embodiment (mind and body) plays in cognition.1 Indeed, recent
findings from research literature on learning and cognition from a diverse array of disci-
pline areas, such as philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and computer sci-
ence, have contributed to the view that traditional cognitivist accounts of the mind should
be challenged because they exclude the close relationship that exists between mind and
body that is more profound than initially considered (Shapiro, 2004, 2007, 2011, 2012)
The central challenger emerging is the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research
area known in the literature as ‘embodied cognition’ (e.g. Calvo and Gomila, 2008;
Coello and Fischer, 2016; Fischer and Coello, 2016; Shapiro, 2004, 2007, 2008, 2011,
2012, 2014; Wilson, 2002).2 Varela et al.’s (1991) book titled The Embodied Mind is
commonly seen as the catalyst for the embodied cognition program because they argue
that cognition is

… inextricably linked to histories that are lived, much like paths that exist only as they are laid
down in walking …. [because] … cognition is no longer seen as problem solving on the basis
of representations; instead, cognition in its most encompassing sense consists in the enactment
or bringing forth of a world by a viable history of structural coupling. (p. 205)

Such an account not only brings to our attention that cognition is grounded in our
embodiment (embodied action) and that these histories are ‘lived’ (experiences) but also
brings to our attention how adaptation to our environment (natural drift) has resulted in a
cognitive system that is enacted through structural coupling and also constrained by the
pathways laid down. Indeed, findings by Varela (1979, 1992, 1999; Thompson and Varela,
2001) and Maturana (Maturana and Varela, 1990, 1998) represent an ongoing commit-
ment to understand the embodied processes of learning and have opened up new theoreti-
cal paths concerning learning and cognition that are less linear, hierarchical, and
representational than earlier conceptions found in the literature. In The Tree of Knowledge,
they highlight the ‘… inseparability between a particular way of being and how the world
appears to us …’ which is nicely summed up in the aphorism, ‘All doing is knowing, and
all knowing is doing’ (Maturana and Varela, 1998: 26). In a sense, how we make distinc-
tions that emerge in action and experience is central to learning, and hence why Maturana
and Varela (1998) refer to the embodiment of learning as something that is ‘circular’ in
nature. This circularity is evident in the capacity of human beings to reflect on ‘knowing
how we know’ through the ‘act of turning back upon ourselves’ in a continuous process of
both discovering our own ‘blindness’ and determining our ‘certainties’ (Maturana and
Shapiro and Stolz 21

Varela, 1998: 24). This constant process of backwards-and-forwards in a circular feed-

back loop involving the mind and body in an environment leads to what Varela et al.
(1991) refer to as the ‘middle way’ of learning between an objective and subjective cer-
tainty of experience. Understandably, embodied cognition is concerned with the mind,
body, and the environment, and as a result promises to upend traditional ways of thinking
about a number of long-studied topics, such as perception, language acquisition, social
interaction, memory, and reasoning.3 Subsequently, for the purposes of this article, we
will be concerned with the discussion of two issues: first, we provide a brief historical
overview that foregrounds the emerging research area of embodied cognition, especially
the important insights that distinguish embodied cognition from its computational fore-
bear, and, second, we outline the educational implications of embodied cognition through
the use of some examples significant to education and provide an argument for the impor-
tance of making these findings accessible to teachers in their educational practice or prac-
tices. It is important to note that while there presently exists some activity in what we
might call ‘embodied education’, ‘embodied learning’, ‘embodied perspective’ or
‘embodied perceiving’, ‘embodied grounding’, and so on,4 we believe that the emerging
interdisciplinary research agenda of embodied cognition contains fertile ground whose
surface has, to date, merely been scratched. We hope this article goes some way toward
deepening the furrows.

A brief historical overview of embodied cognition:

Foregrounding an emerging research area
A convenient entry into embodied cognition begins with a simplified description of the
conception of mind that it seeks to replace. This conception, at the core of the cognitive
revolution that displaced behavioristic psychology in the middle of the last century,
depicts psychological processes as computational, involving algorithmic operations over
symbolic representations. In contrast to behaviorism, which concerned itself with the
discovery of laws relating observable stimuli to observable behavior, traditional cogni-
tive science focuses on the processes internal to an organism, that is, the unobservable
(by direct means), and presumably computational, processes by which symbolically
encoded stimuli are transformed into symbolically encoded instructions that result in the
production of intelligent behavior. In short, cognitivist attempts to probe the internal
workings of the ‘black box’ that the behaviorist regards as impenetrable to experimental
investigation.
Following from this computational theory of mind (as it is now called) are three cen-
tral commitments that embodied cognition challenges:

1. Body–mind dualism: Although cognivists do not subscribe to anything like

Cartesian dualism, according to which minds are non-physical substances, they
do adhere to a dualism of a different sort. Insofar as psychological processes are
computational, they can be investigated without regard to the ‘hardware’ in which
they are implemented. Perhaps the most obvious way to see this point is to con-
sider that the same software program, for example, PowerPoint, can be run on
22 Theory and Research in Education 17(1)

different kinds of hardware, for example, Mac and PC computers. Just as one can
investigate the properties of PowerPoint without considering the physical fea-
tures of the computer chips and circuitry on which it is running, so too the psy-
chologist can investigate minds without regard for their bodily implementation.
2. Amodal symbols: A symbol is amodal when the relationship between it and what
it represents is arbitrary. For instance, the word ‘martini’ is a symbol that repre-
sents a particular kind of cocktail. But the connection between the word and the
cocktail is arbitrary in the sense that there is no reason that word should be used
to stand for that cocktail. ‘Martini’ might have been used to refer to a kind of
marsupial. Nothing mandates that it be used to represent a cocktail. Similarly, the
binary symbol for number seven is ‘111’, whereas the more-standard Arabic
symbol is ‘7’. But, as with ‘martini’, there is no reason that these symbols, rather
than others, should be used to name number seven. Computers, obviously, encode
information in amodal symbols. The ‘1’s’ and ‘0’s’ (or, more accurately, the posi-
tive and negative magnetic charges) with which they encode information are only
arbitrarily connected to their referents. Correspondingly, if psychological pro-
cesses are computational, then the connection between patterns of neural activity
and what these patterns represent will also be arbitrary. Indeed, this is another
reason why, as mentioned above, the psychologist need not care about implemen-
tational details as there is no intrinsic connection between the content of the mind
and symbolic ‘vehicles’ that bear this content.
3. Poverty of the stimulus: Although this idea is not directly entailed by a commit-
ment to computationalism, it has long been associated with it. Cognitive scien-
tists have long held that the stimulation an organism encounters is impoverished
– it underspecifies the world – and thus it is the computational brain’s job to
process this stimulation according to rules that ‘fill in’ this missing information.
Chomsky, for instance, proposed that human beings are equipped with an internal
set of linguistic rules, a grammar that makes sense of the messy stream of speech
they encounter in their first years of life. Similarly, computational vision theorists
(e.g. Marr, 1982) assume that information on the retina requires numerous stages
of computational processing in order to represent accurately the layout of sur-
faces in the environment.

Interestingly, this commitment to the idea that cognition is an ampliative process, the
job of which is to convert a sparse or impoverished representation of the world into
something richer and more accurate, can underlie different conceptions of computation.
For instance, the ampliative assumption guides not only traditional computational
approaches to cognition but more contemporary approaches, such as those pursued by
so-called ‘connectionists’, as well (Rumelhart and McClelland, 1986). To be sure, tre-
mendous controversy surrounds questions about how to make sense of concepts such as
representation, rule-instantiation, and computation within connectionist machines
(Hatfield, 1991), but, whatever the outcome of these disputes, it is clear that connection-
ist machines do compute insofar as they transform inputs into outputs. Also clear is that
connectionist models of cognition share with traditional computationalism the view that
such computation is necessary in order to convert an initially impoverished stimuli (or
Shapiro and Stolz 23

inputs) into something more detailed. Replacing the ‘assumptions’ that receive explicit
representation in classical computational algorithms are excitatory or inhibitory connec-
tions between nodes that implicitly ‘contain’ assumptions about the world in the form of
the weightings they acquire as the connectionist network is ‘trained up’. For this reason,
connectionism, despite its differences with traditional ‘rules and representations’ analy-
ses of computationalism, might still be sensibly construed as a kind of computationalism,
the purpose of which is to embellish impoverished stimuli into something that can be of
eventual use to a cognitive agent.
Let us now consider how embodied cognition responds to the cognitivist’s commit-
ment to mind–body dualism, amodal symbols, and poverty of the stimulus. We noted that
these commitments reflect an allegiance to a computational theory of mind. But embod-
ied cognition has no such allegiance. Instead, the embodiment theorist’s guiding assump-
tion is that an organism’s body is, in some sense, integrated in cognitive processing.
Exactly how to understand this integration remains controversial, but examination of
some research projects helps to clarify the idea.
A number of studies indicate that the body plays a role in language processing
(Glenberg, 2008, 2010, 2015; Glenberg et al., 2013; Glenberg and Kaschak, 2002). If
mind–body dualism of the sort to which computationalism is committed were true, then,
some embodiment theorists have argued, we should not expect the body to influence
language processing in the way that it appears to do. Glenberg et al. (2008) have per-
formed a number of experiments that reveal a surprising connection between, on the one
hand, a subject’s capacity to understand a sentence and, on the other, bodily actions that
the subject is asked to make either prior to or during judgments of sentence sensibility.
In one such experiment, subjects must move 600 beans from a wide-mouthed jar into a
narrow-mouthed jar. In the ‘away’-condition, subjects moved the beans from the proxi-
mate wide-mouthed jar to the distal narrow-mouthed jar. The direction of motion is
reversed in the ‘toward’-condition. Following this task, subjects are exposed to sentences
that are either sensible or non-sensible. The critical sensible sentences describe an away-
or toward-transfer (e.g. ‘You deal Mark the cards’; ‘Mark deals you the cards’). An
example of a nonsense sentence is ‘Mark deals the cards you’. Surprisingly, subjects who
engaged in the away-condition were slower to judge as sensible away-transfer sentences,
and subjects engaged in the toward-condition were slower to judge as sensible toward-
transfer sentences.
Before speculating about why repetitive motion in a particular direction slows com-
prehension of transfer sentences in the ‘same’ direction, we should pause to note how
odd these results are from the perspective of computational cognitive science. If lan-
guage processing were purely computational, then why should the movement of beans
make a difference to judgments of sentence sensibility? Moreover, Glenberg et al. (2008)
found that when subjects moved beans with their right hand and were asked to register a
sensibility judgment on a keyboard using their left hand, the effect disappeared. Why
should a computational process show sensitivity not only to repeated arm motions but
also to which arm is moving? No matter how one interprets these results, they would not
be predicted on the assumption that language processes are computational.
So far, this experiment, and many others like it, implicates an unexpected influence of
the body on language comprehension, thus calling into question the body–mind dualism
24 Theory and Research in Education 17(1)

that follows quite naturally from the computational theory of mind. But, additionally,
among Glenberg et al.’s (2008) explanations for the results is one that calls into question
the computationalist’s commitment to amodal symbols. Perhaps, Glenberg et al. (2008)
suggest that the comprehension of sentences about transfer actions involves a simulation
of the action itself. That is, when reading the sentence ‘You deal Mark the cards’, a sub-
ject simulates a performance of this action. In this context, ‘simulation’ refers to the
activation of some areas of the brain that would be involved were the subject actually to
perform the action described in the sentence. Hence, when a subject reads a sentence
about dealing cards to Mark, areas of the subject’s brain that would be involved in such
an action become active. Moreover, if the subject had been in the away-condition and
then reads a sentence describing an away-transfer, the fatigue induced in the motor areas
of the brain by the repeated away-motions as the subject moved beans away from himself
inhibits or interferes with comprehension of the away-sentence.
Importantly, this explanation of the data denies the amodal nature of cognitive repre-
sentations. The amodality of a symbol derives from the arbitrariness of its connection to
the content it represents. As we observed earlier, ‘martini’ could as well represent a mar-
supial as a cocktail. The neural ‘symbols’ to which computationalists assign meaning are
similarly arbitrary, in the sense that their format invokes nothing ‘reminiscent’ of the
stimulus that causes their activation. But Glenberg et al.’s (2008) explanation of the
results depends on the idea that when a subject reads a sentence, it is encoded in those
areas of the brain that are involved in performing the actions the sentence describes.
Thus, sentences about away- or toward-transfers are not encoded in symbols that bear
only an arbitrary connection to the actions they represent. Rather, they are encoded in
precisely those areas of the brain that are involved in performing the actions that the
sentences describe (see also Barsalou, 1999). Instead of being formatted in an area of the
brain that bears no connection to the experiences a particular stimulus elicits, embodied
or modal symbols are tied directly to such experiences because they replicate the patterns
of neural activation that occur in the brain when encountering the actual stimulus.5
Glenberg et al.’s (2008) explanation of these results is in keeping with a wealth of
neuroscientific research, inspired by studies like this, that suggest a tight connection
between cognitive processing and brain areas associated with physical motion. Thus, we
now know that reading a sentence about kicking a ball will activate areas of the brain that
are involved when actually kicking a ball (Pulvermüller, 2005). We know that applica-
tion of transmagnetic stimulation to areas of the brain involved in motor control will
interfere with comprehension of sentences that describe actions (Pulvermüller, 2005).
We also know that understanding others’ actions requires activation of those parts of the
brain that would be involved when taking similar actions, oneself (Gallese et al., 1996;
Rizzolatti and Craighero, 2004). These neuroscientific findings all lend support to the
idea that the brain represents the world not through amodal symbols but, in effect, by
trying to imagine a body in active engagement with the world.
Turning finally to the computationalist’s assumption regarding the poverty of the
stimuli to which organisms respond, we find embodiment theorists embracing the eco-
logical psychologist J. J. Gibson’s idea that, in fact, the stimuli an organism encounters
contain all the information necessary for perception (Gibson, 1950, 1966).
Computationalists miss this fact because, Gibson held, they do not appreciate how
Shapiro and Stolz 25

embodied organisms, in active engagement with their environments, can ‘pick up’ the
very information that they believe to be absent. According to Gibson, an organism’s
movement through the environment will reveal certain invariances in the stimulus array
it confronts, rendering unnecessary a need for the computational embellishments to
information that traditional cognitive scientists take for granted.
As an example of this idea, consider the extensively studied question about how an
outfielder standing more than 200 ft from home plate is able to situate himself precisely
where he needs to be to catch a fly ball. A computational solution requires that the brain
processes information about the velocity of the ball following its impact with a bat, its
direction, and its angle. The brain then, presumably, applies sophisticated calculations to
deduce the location where the ball will drop. But the alternative embodied approach
requires only that the outfielder move laterally until the ball no longer appears to be mov-
ing along a curved path, but instead appears to be rising in a straight line. This pattern of
motion carries the information that the outfielder is now standing precisely where he
needs to be to catch the ball (McBeath et al., 1995).
So far, we have presented some of the main ideas that distinguish embodied cognition
from computational cognitive science. Together, the ideas suggest a new way of
approaching old topics. For instance, decades of standard practice in a perceptual psy-
chology laboratory would have subjects sitting in front of a computer display making
judgments about stimuli as they flash across the screen; however, if the perception is
embodied, such a practice prevents the very sort of active, environmental engagement on
which cognition depends.
Similarly, long-standing questions about certain kinds of behavior might, from the
embodied perspective, have been looking for answers in the wrong places. As an example,
psychologists have puzzled over why 7- to 12-month-old infants will make a strange sort
of reaching error. Having observed and retrieved an attractive toy placed under one cup,
the infant then sees the toy moved beneath another cup, but the infant will continue to
reach for the first cup. A traditional explanation attributes the error to a mismatch between
the object representation the infant has internalized and an ability to place reaching behav-
ior under the control of this concept (see Piaget, 1955 [1937]). But the embodiment expla-
nation eschews talk of representations in favor of an account that focuses on relations
between the infant’s body – the mass of its arms – and variables such as the distance
between the infant and the toy, as well as the delay between hiding the object and reaching
for it. This second explanation trades in the computational equipment associated with
reference to things like object representations, for the equipment of dynamical systems
theory, which is well suited to examine the interactions between variables such as arm
mass, distance of stimulus from the infant, and distance between the two cups. Such an
explanation has now made predictions and answered questions about an infant’s reaching
behavior that first kind of explanation has missed (Thelen et al., 2001).
Similarly, behavior that appears inexplicable or completely unexpected from a com-
putational perspective lends itself to an embodied treatment. Casasanto (2009), for
instance, told subjects a story about a child who loves zebras and thinks that they are
good but hates pandas and thinks that they are bad. Subjects were then shown two boxes
in a row and were asked to draw the animals in the boxes where they belonged. Right-
handed subjects drew the good zebra in the box to the right and the bad panda in the box
26 Theory and Research in Education 17(1)

to the left; left-handed subjects did the reverse. Like in the experiment of Glenberg’s we
discussed above, Casasanto’s explanation for this strange behavior assumes that sub-
jects’ concepts of good and bad are represented modally: the concept of good in a right-
handed person is in part represented in areas of motor cortex in the left hemisphere
(which controls the right hand), and this is because right-handed subjects prefer (and so
develop good, rather than bad, associations with) actions to their right.
Given the tremendous variety of issues to which an embodied perspective might be
usefully applied, the natural question seems not to be whether embodied cognition might
help to inform educational practices, but how. As a result, in the next section of this arti-
cle, we offer some examples relevant to education and argue that teachers ought to be
incorporating findings from the field of embodied education into their educational prac-
tice or practices.

The educational implications of embodied cognition: Some

examples significant to education
We are cognizant of recent theoretical and empirically oriented literature of embodied
cognition in educational contexts, particularly from a science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics (STEM) point of view (e.g. Abrahamson and Lindgren, 2014;
Abrahamson and Sánchez-García, 2016; Hutto et al., 2015; Hutto and Sánchez-García,
2015; Lakoff and Núñez, 2000; Nathan and Walkington, 2017; Newcombe and Weisberg,
2017; Núñez et al., 1999; Pouw et al., 2014; Radford, 2003, 2009). As such, our inten-
tions are to extend on this literature as a means to demonstrate the educational implica-
tions of embodied cognition. Take, for instance, the hypothetical classroom scenario. A
science teacher wants to introduce an unfamiliar instrument, such as two bicycle wheels
that can spin independently on a single axle (similar to gyroscope wheel, but with two
wheels), to his or her class for the first time. From the range of possible options available
to the teacher, he or she could (1) describe the properties of the instrument with an
emphasis on particulars like its shape, sound, color, and so on; (2) show a video that
demonstrates the physical properties of the instrument and how it is used; and/or (3) take
students to a science laboratory to observe an experiment being conducted with the
instrument while providing an opportunity to experiment with the instrument them-
selves. Of course, there are other possible methods that could be employed to teach the
concepts of torque and angular momentum in physics. However, our point is to highlight
how physical experience can enhance and positively influence students’ learning of sci-
entific concepts (e.g. Konya et al., 2015). Understandably, some teachers may want to
know the reason or reasons why physical experience can enhance learning through
instructional manipulatives. Indeed, embodied cognition is concerned with the interac-
tion of the mind, body, and environment in explaining how knowledge is grounded in
sensorimotor routines and experiences (Barsalou, 1999, 2008; Lakoff and Johnson,
1999). As a result, in this section, our attention turns to the educational implications of
embodied cognition through some specific examples relevant to education.
An interesting starting point is a popular view of teaching and learning that argues
mastery of discipline-specific knowledge should take place first (formalisms first view
of learning), before it can be applied (Nathan, 2012). Such a view has been found to be
Shapiro and Stolz 27

deeply questionable because it tends to reinforce a formalisms-only mind-set toward

learning and teaching that is rooted in dualistic views of knowledge that fallaciously
associate intellectual work with the ‘mind’ and practical work with the ‘body’ – precisely
the distinction that embodied cognition denies. Indeed, the research literature highlights
some of the problems with viewing learning as a change (only in one direction) in repre-
sentations from concrete to abstract or abstract to concrete (so-called ‘transfer of learn-
ing’) because instructional manipulations of learning do not necessarily involve a linear
type of shift (Pouw et al., 2014). In this case, embodied cognition would claim that learn-
ing is not dependent upon the establishment of a complex set of symbolic rules that are
decontextualized from sensorimotor experiences and the environment. In contrast, from
the perspective of embodied cognition, learning is contingent upon the cognitive activity
that is triggered by the environment and is determined by the dynamic nature of living
beings engaged in the self-organizing activities by which they sustain themselves
(Maturana and Varela, 1998). This development marks a gradual transition that involves
a form of embodied knowledge, where the learner either becomes less dependent on
external support over time or learns what kind of external support can be used in place of
more costly ‘internal’ cognitive machinery, as in the case of the fly ball. Although this
transition or ‘structural drift’ is due to the learners’ interaction with an environment, the
environmental parameters fix the boundaries where learning can be promoted or
restrained; however, it is important to note that this does not determine the direction or
outcome of learning as this is structurally determined (Horn and Wilburn, 2005).
Embodied cognition supports the differing view that learning involves synchronous
cycles of activity and the dynamic balance of support that emerges from interactions with
the environment. For instance, when an outfielder in baseball catches a fly ball, it may
appear that they are dependent on sophisticated cognitive operations, when in fact they
are exploiting features of the environment in a way that reduces cognitive load.
Schwartz et al. (2005) highlight what they consider to be a problematic division in the
literature concerning the learning of firsthand (direct experience) and secondhand knowl-
edge (descriptions of experience). They argue that because most formal learning is asso-
ciated with the application of secondhand knowledge (often through language), it is
problematic because it requires that students interpret descriptions of the world in the
absence of the original referent. Similarly, firsthand learning in isolation is equally prob-
lematic because direct experiences need to be coupled with secondhand knowledge to be
given any meaning. Quite rightly, Schwartz et al. (2005) argue that when it comes to
learning, the focus should not be on ‘either/or’ in an attempt to isolate certain learning
outcomes, but more of an emphasis on ‘both/and’ as a means to integrate firsthand and
secondhand knowledge. In fact, research by Glenberg (2008, 2010) supports this integra-
tive approach to learning and the importance of both physical manipulation and imag-
ined manipulation in mathematics and reading comprehension. In particular, it is worth
noting the importance of physical manipulation before imagined manipulation. The rea-
son for this appears to be due to the significance of the practical manipulative experience
grounding abstract symbols (i.e. words and mathematical symbols) in the internalization
of embodied mental models (Glenberg, 2008, 2010).
One area where embodied cognition research has interesting educational implications
concerns the role gestures play in learning. For instance, research by Goldin-Meadow
28 Theory and Research in Education 17(1)

(Church and Goldin-Meadow, 1986; Cook et al., 2005; Goldin-Meadow, 2003, 2009;
Goldin-Meadow and Butcher, 2003; Goldin-Meadow et al., 1993, 1999, 2001, 2007,
2009; Goldin-Meadow and Singer, 2003; Goldin-Meadow and Wagner, 2005; Novack
and Goldin-Meadow, 2015; Perry et al., 1988) and her colleagues have investigated why
people gesture when they speak. Curiously, such gestures occur even when the conver-
sational partner is on the other end of a telephone call. Not only do we gesture as we
speak to people who may be miles away from us, but blind people who have never seen
a gesture also gesture when they speak. Why is speech so closely associated with ges-
ture? Does it convey information not found in speech?
One hypothesis receiving increasing support is that gesture is itself a form of commu-
nication that can either duplicate the information conveyed in speech or, more interest-
ingly, contribute information that diverges from that present in speech. Indeed, Church
and Goldin-Meadow (1986), Goldin-Meadow and Wagner (2005), and Perry et al. (1988)
have examined the relationship between gesture and speech used by children. Church and
Goldin-Meadow (1986) and Goldin-Meadow and Wagner (2005) observed children who
were asked whether the quantity of water in two tall glasses was the same and then whether
the quantity of water remained the same when the contents of one of the glasses was
poured into a low, wide glass. Many children were non-conservers: that is, they judged the
quantities to be the same when the water reached the same height in the two tall glasses,
but different when the height of the water was lower in the wide glass. Some non-conserv-
ers would explain their judgment by saying that the height of the water in the two glasses
differed and by pointing to the height of the water in the tall glass and then pointing to the
height of the water in the wide glass. In these cases, the gestures and the speech conveyed
the same information about water height. Other non-conservers, however, displayed a
mismatch between their speech and gestures. This gesture–speech ‘mismatch’ was first
identified by Church and Goldin-Meadow (1986) in their study of children’s explanations
of conservation problems. They found that the combination of gesture and speech can
provide an insight into transitional knowledge states of children, particularly as they grap-
ple to make connections between old knowledge states and new concepts. Indeed, they
found that a subset of children tended to use gestures that differed in content from what
was conveyed simultaneously in speech. To understand this phenomenon, Church and
Goldin-Meadow (1986) introduced two new terms: ‘discordance’, which refers to expla-
nations in which gesture fails to match speech, and ‘concordance’, which refers to expla-
nations in which gesture and speech convey the same content. Church and Goldin-Meadow
(1986) concluded that gesture–speech measurement of discordance provides a useful tool
in identifying a child’s level of understanding of a concept, and hence readiness to learn.
As such, subsequent studies by Perry et al. (1988) highlighted how different types of
gesture–speech discordance with respect to a particular concept could be used by teachers
to tailor instruction to the child’s current level of understanding.
From an educational point of view, what is interesting about this finding relates to the
way children who display discordance are more receptive to instruction about conserva-
tion than children who display concordance (Goldin-Meadow, 2009; Goldin-Meadow
and Singer, 2003; Goldin-Meadow and Wagner, 2005; Perry et al., 1988). This led
Goldin-Meadow (2009) to conclude that discordance is a sign of readiness to learn
because it indicates the presence of an idea that is not quite available to the subject’s
Shapiro and Stolz 29

conscious awareness and so is not quite ready to be articulated in speech. It is as if part

of the subject – the part that speaks – believes that the quantities of water differ, but
another part – the part that gestures – understands that differences in the width of the
glasses are relevant to conservation judgments. Unlike the subjects who exhibit concord-
ance, those whose gestures and speech show a mismatch are closing in on the correct
understanding of conservation and thus primed for further educational interventions by
the teacher to elicit dynamic gesture production that corresponds to their spoken expla-
nation. Indeed, it was found that when teachers are aware of gesture, they pick up infor-
mation about their students’ cognitive state that was not available in their speech
(Goldin-Meadow, 2009; Goldin-Meadow and Singer, 1999, 2003; Novack and Goldin-
Meadow, 2015). Observation of teachers revealed that they adopt different teaching
strategies for students who display either discordance or concordance, relying more on
mismatches of their own when explaining principles of conservation to students who
mismatch (Goldin-Meadow and Singer, 2003). Similarly, the same study by Goldin-
Meadow and Singer (2003) showed that teachers who display discordance benefit stu-
dent learners because they expose them to a range of strategies in the gestural modality,
thus teaching them how to ‘think with gestures’ about certain problems.
Additional work on gesture reveals its importance in the acquisition of mathematical
concepts. Alibali and Nathan (2012), following McNeill (1992), distinguish between dif-
ferent kinds of gestures. Pointing gestures draw attention to objects, individuals, or loca-
tions; iconic gestures, typically created by shaping the hands in particular ways or by
‘drawing’ in the air, represent objects (e.g. a bowl) or shapes (e.g. a triangle); and meta-
phoric gestures convey meaning through metaphoric extension, as, for instance, when
rocking one’s hand back and forth to indicate that one is ‘weighing’ an idea. Alibali and
Nathan describe how teachers might exploit each kind of gesture to clarify, for example,
the order of operations in an equation, or present the relationships between analogous geo-
metrical shapes, or explain how to conceive of a line’s slope. In these cases, the body
becomes a conveyer of information that might be used to supplement or replace the infor-
mation provided by symbolic constructions of the sort more standardly associated with
educational instruction, that is, words or writing on a board. In addition, the use of gesture
provides students with a new tool with which to express or try out ideas. Insofar as this new
tool does the work that would otherwise fall to ‘pure mentation’, cognitive load is reduced
(Roth, 2001), in a way analogous to that in the outfielder case we described earlier.
Drawing from the studies of gesture, we would like to state concisely four educational
implications. The first three are specific to the role of gesture in learning. The last is more
general and speaks broadly to the importance of embodiment in instructional contexts.
We close this section with a more detailed examination of this fourth implication:

1. Teachers could and should look for concrete cues such as gesture–speech mis-
matches in order to identify students who have not fully comprehended the con-
cept being taught. In response to these mismatches, teachers could increase the
proportion of gesture–speech matches they use in teacher instruction, particularly
when instructing students who are in transitional knowledge states.
2. The use of gesture in teacher instruction encourages learners to produce gestures
of their own, or imitate the gestures that their teachers produce, which can
30 Theory and Research in Education 17(1)

enhance learning. In addition, encouraging students to gesture allows knowledge

to be conveyed through their bodies that cannot verbally be communicated, but
most importantly it demonstrates that the student is ready to learn.
3. Gestures can be classified into different categories, with each category defined by
a particular function. For instance, gesturing is known to either alter the learners’
responses and thoughts or lighten the cognitive load of the teacher or learner
because it shifts the cognitive load from verbal to visuospatial stores, thus permit-
ting the individual to work harder on the task and/or change their representation
of the task in a manner that facilitates learning. Teachers who acquaint them-
selves with the distinct purposes of different kinds of gesture will be able ‘read’
and communicate more effectively with their students.
4. Embodiment offers either a causal route to more effective learning or a diagnostic
tool for measuring conceptual understanding, and thus, educational ‘best practice
or practices’ require that instructors keep abreast of current research in embodied
education.

As indicated above, this fourth implication is more general than the preceding three
and also, due to its prescriptive nature, perhaps most in need of additional elaboration
and defense. Of course, the preceding discussion of gesture anticipates this fourth point
to an extent; however, the research we examined risks leaving the impression that gesture
develops spontaneously and that the effective instructor’s job consists mainly in learning
the meanings that different gestures communicate and, perhaps, in modeling gesture for
the purpose of facilitating students’ acquisition of gesture. Doubtless, a teacher who
masters both these tasks will be more effective, ceteris paribus, than one who does not.
Yet, the point we wish to emphasize now is this: occasionally the gestures and, more
generally, bodily actions that students exhibit spontaneously when learning a task are
wrong for the task, in the sense that they diminish rather than improve task performance,
or they are diagnostic of conceptual misunderstandings and thus useful in assessing a
student’s comprehension of a topic.
This claim, that some embodied learning strategies are in fact detrimental to learning
or indicative of conceptual misunderstanding, constitutes the first premise in our argu-
ment for the normative conclusion that we draw in (4) above. The second premise is
simply that which gestures and other bodily actions correlate with success in learning
and which indicate conceptual deficiency are a matter for empirical investigation. But,
third, such empirical investigation is a primary focus of research in the field of embodied
education. Hence, we conclude, educational ‘best practice or practices’ require that
teachers remain informed of research findings from the field of embodied education.
Before turning to our defense of the premises in this argument, we offer a couple of
preliminary remarks. First, we began this article with the observation that psychology
and education are necessarily intertwined, given that the purpose of education is to pro-
mote learning and that learning is a psychological capacity. We take the argument we are
presently developing to move beyond this truism and to establish in more forceful terms
the significance of a particular psychological research program – embodied cognition –
to the educational mission. Second, we recognize that the argument that we sketched in
the paragraph above is not, formally speaking, deductively valid. This is because fields
Shapiro and Stolz 31

other than what we have been calling embodied education could, conceivably, shine light
on which embodied learning strategies are to be preferred, and so, perhaps, teachers
might look elsewhere for this kind of information. We accept this point but submit that,
presently, the field of embodied education appears to be the best source of information
about how bodily actions might contribute to or provide information about learning, and
so rest content that our argument, even if not deductively valid, provides a compelling
case for our recommendation that educators avail themselves of the findings that emerge
from embodiment researchers.
Clearly, it is the first premise in our argument that requires most justification, and we
shall do so by considering two studies. Both studies reveal that the gestures a student
adopts when solving a particular problem may be either poorly suited to the task or
indicative of conceptual confusion. In either case, a teacher who is unfamiliar with the
relevant literature on embodied cognition will miss an opportunity either to correct the
student, offering her or him a more effective means of ‘embodying’ a solution, or to rec-
ognize that the student’s gestures are a symptom of conceptual confusion.
Before turning to these studies, we offer a word of caution with respect to their inter-
pretation. Both studies reveal a correlation between a style of gesture and extent of suc-
cess in task performance. However, neither study, in our view, establishes whether the
style of gesture one adopts causes one to be more or less successful in task performance
or, in contrast, whether one’s understanding of the task determines how one chooses to
gesture. This indeterminacy lies behind our decision to formulate our first premise as a
disjunction. If style of gesturing makes a causal difference to how well one performs on
a given task, clearly educators should teach and encourage the use of effective gesturing.
On the contrary, if poor performance is merely correlated with rather than caused by the
choice to use a particular style of gesturing, then an educator has the opportunity to
regard such gestures as a diagnostic symptom – an indication that a student may be con-
ceptually deficient in some respect. As we describe the studies below, we will retain this
attitude of neutrality toward the question of whether gestures are causes or indicators of
conceptual understanding. That is, we will take the studies to show that choice in gesture
makes either a causal difference to task performance or that it marks a student as possess-
ing a particular level of conceptual clarity.
The first study (Walkington et al., 2014) involves college students who are asked to
prove a mathematical conjecture: the sum of the lengths of two sides of a triangle is
always greater than the length of the third side. Students were broken into two groups.
Those in the control group were seated in front of the computer screen on which the
conjecture was displayed and given pen and paper; those in the experimental group stood
in front of the computer screen and were not provided with pen and paper.
Students availed themselves of four distinct strategies when attempting proofs of the
conjecture. Those who neither gestured nor used pen and paper were least successful
(only 11.5% could provide a correct proof), and those who used pen and paper were
slightly more successful (27.3%).6 Of special interest for present purposes, however, is
the difference in success between students who used one or the other of two gesturing
strategies. Those who produced ‘static depictive gestures’, in which hands were used to
create a static representation of a triangle, akin to a figure drawn on paper, correctly
proved the conjecture 34.3% of the time. In contrast, students who engaged in ‘dynamic
32 Theory and Research in Education 17(1)

depictive gestures’ offered a correct proof at a rate of 63.6%. As Walkington (2014)

describes these gestures,

problem-solvers first represent an object, and then engage in fluid transformations of that object
using the affordances of their body. For example, a problem-solver might ‘collapse’ the triangle
formed with their hands into two line segments on top of each other. (p. 480)

The lesson we take from Walkington’s study is that choice in gesturing strategy cor-
relates with success in task performance. As mentioned earlier, this correlation may be
evidence for a causal relationship, in which case students who are encouraged to gesture
dynamically rather than statically will, in certain conceptual domains, be more likely to
discover important insights. Alternatively, students who display static gestures may be
signaling a conceptual misunderstanding – one that a shift to dynamical gesturing may
help to alleviate or one that should be remedied in some other way.
We draw a similar lesson from an examination of Gerofsky’s study of students’ under-
standing of Cartesian graphs (Gerofsky, 2011). Gerofsky elicited gestures from a group
of 8th grade (age 13) and 11th grade (age 16) students. The students, selected by their
teachers, were representative of ‘top’, ‘average’, or ‘struggling’ mathematics students.
This information was held from Gerofsky until the conclusion of her study. The students’
task was simply to describe a variety of graphs using gestures, vocal sounds, and words,
but to refrain from formal mathematical descriptions.
Gerofsky (2011) found that students could be fitted into one of three categories. Some
produced minimal gestures: ‘small movements of a finger, hand and arm, without a great
deal of larger kinesthetic movement involving the spine’ (p. 251). Interestingly, these
gestures appear comparable to the static depictive gestures that Walkington et al. (2014)
observed in her subjects, insofar as students seemed to imagine a static depiction of a
graph in their mind’s eye: ‘it was as if they were tracing a small graph on a vertical plane
of glass or a sheet of paper in front of their upper-body, using a finger-tip “pencil” …’
(Gerofsky, 2011: 251).
Similarly, students in the second category adopted gestures analogous to Walkington’s
dynamic depictive gestures: ‘These gestured graphs involved noticeable movement of
the spine and often markedly kinesthetic, whole-body movements. Some students’ ges-
tures required them to reach, move off balance or take a step or two’ (Gerofsky, 2011:
251). The final category of students generated gestures that ‘did not correspond accu-
rately to the shapes of the graphs, and often large sections of the graph were omitted’
(Gerofsky, 2011: 251).
In light of our earlier presentation of Walkington’s study, it should come as no surprise
that of the three gesturing categories, those who engaged in the most dynamic form were
also top mathematics students, and those who exhibited static gestures were average.
Students whose gestures were erratic and inaccurate were struggling in mathematics. We
take these results as further confirmation of our claim that how a student gestures cor-
relates with how well they will perform on a particular conceptual task. Dynamic ges-
tures prove more effective in creating an understanding of graphs, or they correlate with
more advanced understanding, whereas static gestures decrease task performance or
indicate a student’s conceptual deficiency.
Shapiro and Stolz 33

We regard studies like the two described above as sufficient to justify the first premise
in our argument: some embodied learning strategies are in fact detrimental to learning or
indicative of conceptual misunderstanding. The remaining premises seem to us to require
no special defense. Premise 2 states simply that the connection between style of embod-
ied action and task performance is not something a teacher could know a priori – it is an
empirical matter and thus a proper subject for experimental investigation. Premise 3
merely affirms that the embodied cognition research program is, presently, the best
source of information about these connections between actions and conceptual learning.
The conclusion we draw from these premises is at once modest but significant. Put mod-
estly, it asserts just that teachers would be wise to attend to research in embodied cogni-
tion so that they can be aware of the causal or diagnostic value of their students’ embodied
actions. The significance of this conclusion, however, grows when we weigh the relative
novelty of research in the field of embodied education (much of this research began only
after the turn of the century) against its obvious relevance to educational practice or
practices. As we hope our discussion of a variety of psychological studies revealed, the
body is extensively integrated within learning processes. However, the ‘newness’ of
embodied cognition research means that much of this information is yet to be dissemi-
nated; indeed, much of this information is yet to be discovered. Thus, we believe, our
conclusion that teachers apprise themselves of embodied educational findings ought best
be construed as a challenge and a clarion call. The research, we hope to have shown, has
obvious significance for education, but its novelty and, in the eyes of more traditionally
inclined psychologists, upstart status leave uncertain the accessibility of its findings to
the very educators who are best situated to exploit them.
Above we saw various ways in which the body may contribute to cognition. It may
influence cognitive processing through action, as it does in Glenberg’s bean transfer
experiment or, in a slightly different way, in an infant’s failure to reach in the right place
for a toy. It might make a difference to how thought and concepts are encoded, as we saw
in Casasanto’s work with right- and left-handers’ judgments about good and bad. It might
help to simplify an otherwise demanding task, as it does when relying on its motion rela-
tive to a fly ball in baseball in order to determine the right place to stand. Within an
educational context, focus on embodiment encourages a teacher to look for bodily cues
that might indicate the preparedness of a student to learn a new concept or to rely on
bodily action to introduce or clarify mathematical concepts. With a properly structured
environment, a student’s entire body might be transformed into something else, for
example, an asteroid, whose motions, because they are also the student’s motions,
become more easily tractable.

Conclusion
Education has turned to psychology to understand human learning and to guide best peda-
gogical practices. In this case, we argue that the emerging research agenda of embodied
cognition has much to offer educational practitioners, researchers, and/or policy-makers.
Although embodied cognition is still in its infancy, the multidisciplinary and interdiscipli-
nary nature of the literature provides some thought-provoking recommendations to enhance
educational practice or practices, which in turn can maximize the effectiveness of the
34 Theory and Research in Education 17(1)

teacher in bringing about student learning. Even though our account of embodied cognition
has been limited due to space restrictions, we would argue that there is considerable poten-
tial for further research and enough existing literature to suggest new ways to think about
instruction and classroom design. This article provided a brief historical overview of
embodied cognition, especially the important insights that distinguish embodied cognition
from its computational forebear. We then turned our attention to the educational implica-
tions of embodied cognition through the use of some examples significant to education,
showing not only how these findings could be used by teachers in their educational practice
or practices but additionally why teachers ought to pay attention to them.

Acknowledgements
The first author (i.e. Prof. Shapiro) is grateful to his hosts at La Trobe University, where a brief
stay in 2017 provided him with the resources to begin work on this paper with the second author
(i.e. Dr Stolz).

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. Although we are fully aware of the ongoing philosophical debate surrounding the mind–body
problem, for the purposes of this article, we use the concept of ‘mind’ in a broad psychologi-
cal sense that characterizes a human being’s capacity to think, perceive, and feel their experi-
ences in the world.
2. It is important to point out that there is no universal definition of the concept of embodied
cognition found in the literature. This should not be viewed as something problematic, but
more a case of reflecting the diverse array of disciplines in which it has emerged. Indeed, it
could be argued that embodied cognition is located at the intersection between psychology
(cognitive and behavioral psychology), science (cognitive and neuroscience), and philosophy
(philosophy of mind). In fact, we would argue that the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary
nature of embodied cognition has the potential to enhance educational practice or practices,
and in turn influence student learning.
3. The edited book by Shapiro (2014) titled The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition
gives a taste of the wide domain of issues that are now being investigated from an embod-
ied perspective. For some other examples, see the following: Joint Ventures: Mindreading,
Mirroring, and Embodied Cognition (Goldman, 2013), Mind in Action: Experience
and Embodied Cognition in Pragmatism (Määttänen, 2015), Perceptual and Emotional
Embodiment: Foundations of Embodied Cognition, Volume 1 (Coello and Fischer, 2016),
and Conceptual and Interactive Embodiment: Foundations of Embodied Cognition, Volume 2
(Fischer and Coello, 2016).
4. See the following: ‘Embodied learning’ (Stolz, 2015), ‘The embodiment of learning’ (Horn
and Wilburn, 2005), Embodiment and Education (O’Loughlin, 2006), ‘Embodied persuasion’
Shapiro and Stolz 35

(Briñol and Petty, 2008), ‘The role of embodied change in perceiving and processing facial
expressions of others’ (Briñol et al., 2010), Embodied Grounding (Semin and Smith, 2008),
‘Embodiment for education’ and ‘Embodiment as a unifying perspective for psychology’
(Glenberg, 2008, 2010), and ‘An embedded and embodied cognition review of instructional
manipulations’ (Pouw et al., 2014). For some recent examples of literature that applies
embodied theories within an educational context, particularly learning, see the following:
‘Embodied cognition and STEM learning’, special issue in Cognitive Research: Principles
and Implication (Newcombe and Weisberg, 2017), and ‘Mind your body: The essential role
of body movements in children’s learning’, special issue in Educational Psychology Review
(Chandler and Tricot, 2015).
5. This pattern of neural activation is often described as ‘offline’ to indicate that it does not cause
the behavior that encounters with an actual stimulus would. The activation is better character-
ized as a simulation of what one would do were one confronted with the actual stimulus.
6. We take this as positive evidence that there is indeed a causal relationship between gesture
and comprehension, at least insofar as gesturing improves performance as compared to non-
gesturing. However, we would like more evidence before inferring that one style of gesture
causes better performance than another.

ORCID iD
Steven A. Stolz https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5900-0329

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Author biographies
Lawrence Shapiro, PhD is a Professor of Philosophy with specializations in Philosophy of Mind
and Philosophy of Cognitive Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA. He is the
author of many articles and books on these topics, including the award winning Embodied
Cognition (Routledge, 2011), which will soon appear in a second edition.
Steven A. Stolz, PhD is a Senior Lecturer at La Trobe University, Australia. His background in
analytical and continental traditions of philosophy has led to a diverse array of research interests
that range from: philosophy of action, moral philosophy, esthetics, epistemology, and phenome-
nology. At the moment, his primary areas of scholarship are concerned with educational philoso-
phy and theory, but he also has a particular interest in the areas of embodied cognition, narrative
enquiry, and learning theories in psychology. Recent publications of note include Theory and
Philosophy in Educational Research: Methodological Dialogues (Routledge, 2018), and MacIntyre,
Rationality and Education: Against Education of Our Age (Springer, 2019).

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