[14] Research has been done to identify the set of ideas that would establish what could be considered as the early stages of embodied cognition around inquiries regarding the mind-body-soul relation and vitalism in the German tradition from 1740 to 1920.

[21] Since the 1950s, encouraged by progress in informatics, researchers began to create digital models of the processes by which sensory input is selected by the brain, stored in the memory, connected to existing knowledge and used for elaboration.

Given this ambiguity, O'Regan, J. K. and Nöe, A. put forth what would later be known as "sensorimotor contingencies" (SMCs) in an attempt to understand the changing character of sensations as actors act in the world.

[44][45] Biology has also inspired Gregory Bateson, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch and Evan Thompson to develop a closely related version of the idea, which they call enactivism.

[47][48][49][50][51] In related work at Haskins, Paul Mermelstein, Philip Rubin, Louis Goldstein, and colleagues developed articulatory synthesis tools for computationally modeling the physiology and aeroacoustics of the vocal tract, demonstrating how cognition and perception of speech can be shaped by biological constraints.

The concept of embodiment has been inspired by research in cognitive neuroscience, such as the proposals of Gerald Edelman concerning how mathematical and computational models such as neuronal group selection and neural degeneracy result in emergent categorization.

In an Electroencephalography (EEG) study researchers showed that in line with the embodied cognition, sensorimotor contingency and common coding theses, sensory and motor processes in the brain are not sequentially separated, they are strongly coupled.

[53] A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study from 2004 showed that passively read action words, such as lick, pick or kick, led to a somatotopic neuronal activity in or adjacent to brain regions associated with actual movement of the respective body parts.

In the field of Robotics researchers such as Rodney Brooks, Hans Moravec and Rolf Pfeifer have argued that true artificial intelligence can only be achieved by machines that have sensory and motor skills and are connected to the world through a body.

Autonomous vehicles have a significant interest in embodied artificial intelligence applications because this technology allows driving and making possible judgments based on what they see as humans do.

Embodied cognition challenges this claim by stating that the existence of cortical maps in the brain fails to explain and account for the subjective character of people's perceptual experiences.

Because mirror neurons are one of the essential parts of the motor system, researchers compared monkeys and humans in an anatomical framework; specifically, they made the comparison with respect to Broca's area.

[78] Another study concerning the role of mirror neurons during learning via language usage stated that activations occurred in Broca's area even when participants watched other people's conversations without hearing the sounds.

[82] An fMRI study examining the relationship of mirror neurons in humans with linguistic materials has shown that there are activations in the premotor cortex and Broca's area when reading or listening to sentences associated with actions.

On the other hand, memory plays a role in tasks that do not occur in the present but involve remembering actions and information from the past and imagining events that may or may not happen in the future.

The results indicate that left premotor areas and the superior temporal sulcus (a brain region responsible for visual processing of biological motion) were activated during learning with gestures.

[110] A related study showed that motor experts use similar processes for the mental rotation of body parts and polygons, whereas non-experts treated these stimuli differently.

[127] When people are led to adopt certain bodily positions indirectly associated with different feelings such as fear, anger, and sadness, these corporeal postures are said to modulate the experienced affect.

[129] Given the significant role emotions (e.g., fear and hope) play in an individual's life, research has been done linking embodiment, motivation, and behavior to investigate the intrinsic tendencies to act towards or away from a given stimulus.

Researchers found out that the participants' harmonious bodily interaction during the emotional preparation process shows that their interest in the image's content displayed on the computer screen increased.

[135] To investigate the role of gestures in AAT, participants were asked to react to positive and negative stimuli by either pressing a (far or near) button on a response pad; or by pushing forward or pulling backward a joystick.

In contrast to the response pad, the joystick couples more naturally with the body (hand) for the performance of the action and facilitates the gesture of approaching or avoiding positive or negative stimuli.

[163] Over the past years, embodied cognition research has gradually redeemed the scientific study of bodily experiences and simultaneously laid a theoretical and empirical foundation across multiple disciplines.

[164] Principles and findings underlying embodied cognition have begun to be transferred and applied in several fields ranging from education, robotics, clinical settings, social psychology, sports, to music.

A limitation was that Shakey's architecture (Lisp) relied heavily on symbolic computational principles that, consequently, demanded that it iterate through long command sequences to perform a particular action.

[183] Vittorio Guidano's post-rationalist cognitive therapy builds on Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's theory of autopoiesis and postulates that human knowledge is emotional and embodied.

The study suggests that using the body to produce timed sequences of action, particularly when music is used as a pacing cue, allows people who have Parkinson's disease to achieve similar performance levels as healthy individuals.

[205] Interbrain neuroscience research[206][207][208][209] in adults and growing evidence of goal-directed behavior in fetuses[210][211][212][213][214][215][216] raise doubts regarding independence and self-sufficiency of the embodied cognition position.

While young organisms need to combine objects, backgrounds, and abstract or emotional features into a single experience to build a surrounding reality, they cannot independently distinguish relevant sensory stimuli.

For example, power posing which is classified under embodied cognition because it states that having a person physically expand their body increases their confidence, failed to be replicated in several cases.