ABSTRACT
Embodied perspectives on concepts (Barsalou, 1999) emphasize that cognition is shaped by both the physical properties of the world (i.e., “grounded”) and the physical constraintsw of our body (i.e., “embodied”); they also underline that cognitive processing strongly depends on current constraints and task demands (i.e., “situated”; Pezzulo, et al. 2013). Behavioral and brain-imaging studies collected in the last 20 years converge in suggesting that seeing an object, for example a Lego brick, activates motor information (Ellis and Tucker 2000). 1 Importantly, the physical context, namely the actual possibility of reaching the object (Ambrosini et al. 2012), as well as the social and affective relations it affords, seem to modulate this motor information (Scorolli 2019). To illustrate, recent proposals (Caravà and Scorolli 2020) stress the importance of the affective dimension in object–agent interactions, emphasizing the role affective and emotional components of objects have in motor responses triggered by visual recognition of those objects.
