title: Towards a common framework of grounded action cognition: Relating motor control, perception and cognition.
abstract: The relation between motor control and action cognition - including action-related thoughts and action-related perception - has been subject to controversial discussions in the last three decades. During these decades, cognitive neuroscience has been increasingly confronted with a huge variety of different accounts trying to understand and explain the relation between these systems, their interdependencies and the mediating mechanisms by establishing notions such as "internal models", "simulation" or "shared representation". These accounts, however, include a large array of partly overlapping, partly contradictory theories using similar terms for different mechanisms and different terms for similar mechanisms. In the absence of a systematic work-up and comparison, this array of accounts and theories leads to confusion in the field, duplication of experimental work, and unconnected parallelism of theory formation within and between different disciplines. Here we provide a systematic comparison of current models and prospective theories that deal with the relation between cognition, perception and motor control mechanisms. In a second step, we propose "grounded action cognition" as a comprehensive metatheoretical framework which defines different hypothetical possibilities of the relations between these domains, offers systematic insights into current models and theories and last but not least may help to increase comparability of empirical research in the domain of action and action cognition.
authors.affiliation: University College London, CEHP Research Department, London, UK; Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
authors.forename: Antje
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gentsch
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany.
authors.forename: Arne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Weber
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurodegenerative Diseases, Hertie-Institute for Clinical Brain Research, University of Tübingen, Germany; German Research Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Matthis
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Synofzik
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany.
authors.forename: Gottfried
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Vosgerau
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany; Psychology Department, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany. Electronic address: simone.bosbach@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Simone
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Schütz-Bosbach
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009043:Motor Activity / Q000502:physiology*; D010465:Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Action cognition; Action perception; Common coding; Grounded cognition; Internal models; Motor control; Simulation