Intellectual Disabilities Behavior Under the Lens of Embodied Cognition Approaches

Abstract

INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES UNDER THE LENS OF EMBODIED COGNITION APPROACHESEC approaches set a new era of cognitive science. It has been claimed that EC describes some of the most complex phenomena of human cognition and behavior, through conceptualization, replacement, and constitution (Shapiro, 2011, p. 9). In more details, conceptualization describes that the properties of an organism's body limit or constrain the concepts an organism can acquire, replacement states that an organism's body in interaction with its environment replaces the need for representational processes thought to have been at the core of cognition; and constitution claims that the body or world plays a constitutive rather than a merely causal role in cognitive processing (Shapiro, 2011). Albeit the explanation from these approaches may cover numerous examples of human behavior, criticism has been advocated recently (Bukow, 2013;Ionescu and Vasc, 2014), given EC may not (equally) well predict behavior for all sorts of human kinds (Shapiro, 2011, p. 90). At least for those with disabilities, which represent 15% of the worldwide population