Costello Matthew C, Bloesch Emily K
Department of Psychology, University of Hartford, West Hartford CT, USA.
Department of Psychology, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant MI, USA.
Front Psychol. 2017 Feb 27;8:267. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00267. eCollection 2017.
Embodied cognition is a theoretical framework which posits that cognitive function is intimately intertwined with the body and physical actions. Although the field of psychology is increasingly accepting embodied cognition as a viable theory, it has rarely been employed in the gerontological literature. However, embodied cognition would appear to have explanatory power for aging research given that older adults typically manifest concurrent physical and mental changes, and that research has indicated a correlative relationship between such changes. The current paper reviews age-related changes in sensory processing, mental representation, and the action-perception relationship, exploring how each can be understood through the lens of embodied cognition. Compared to younger adults, older adults exhibit across all three domains an increased tendency to favor visual processing over bodily factors, leading to the conclusion that older adults are less embodied than young adults. We explore the significance of this finding in light of existing theoretical models of aging and argue that embodied cognition can benefit gerontological research by identifying further factors that can explain the cause of age-related declines.
具身认知是一种理论框架，它假定认知功能与身体及身体行为紧密相连。尽管心理学领域越来越接受具身认知作为一种可行的理论，但它在老年学文献中很少被应用。然而，鉴于老年人通常同时表现出身体和心理上的变化，且研究表明这些变化之间存在相关关系，具身认知似乎对衰老研究具有解释力。本文回顾了与年龄相关的感觉加工、心理表征以及动作 - 感知关系的变化，探讨如何通过具身认知的视角来理解每一个方面。与年轻人相比，老年人在所有这三个领域都表现出更倾向于视觉加工而非身体因素的趋势增强，从而得出老年人比年轻人更少具身的结论。我们根据现有的衰老理论模型探讨这一发现的意义，并认为具身认知可以通过识别更多能够解释与年龄相关衰退原因的因素，从而使老年学研究受益。
