In the traditional, information-processing model of cognition the human mind does well with lyrics, but it just cannot dance. Real life is like a musical, rich with elaborate sets, costumes, music, and movement as well as dialog, and impossible to appreciate fully just by reading the script. That's not to say that words are unimportant: They carry a huge amount of information, and language is a defining feature of our species. Language is especially important to academics since our own histories and battles take place largely through print. But people are actors in the show, not just readers in a library, and our minds must serve this performance. Whereas the traditional approach to cognition was all about the lyrics, the embodied cognition approach turns on the video and sound to help us understand how people feel the beat in their social interactions.
As nicely articulated by Kaschak and Maner (2009) in the target paper, the principle of embodied cognition is that nervous systems ''evolved to allow organisms to successfully plan and execute action in the world''(p. 3). In other words, thinking is grounded in simulated physical experience, which informs our judgments and behaviors. The authors take a fresh approach in applying an evolutionary framework to the role of embodiment in social cognition, offering a rich basis for new research questions and hypotheses about how embodied cognition works. Our commentary explores three broad issues raised by the target paper: (1) Implications for the role of non-verbal communication in social cognition;
(2) emotion as an important mechanism for embodied social cognition; and (3) the challenges of embodied cognition in an increasingly disembodied social world.
GETTING IN STEP: NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL COGNITION
Traditional social cognition paradigms emphasized lyrics and dialog in our understanding of other people-information easily represented through words. In contrast, Kaschak and Maner's approach emphasizes the choreography of our physical interactions with the world. In social interaction, the most important information may be communicated nonverbally, through facial expressions, tone of voice, gaze direction, gestures, and so on (Knapp & Hall 2006). Words alone are often quite ambiguous. For example, the comment ''nice outfit'' can function as an insult, a compliment, or a flirtation depending on costume, choreography, and plot-what the target is actually wearing, how the speaker moves, and where the words occur in the sequence of non-verbal exchange between both parties. Another distinctive feature of Kaschak and Maner's evolutionary approach is that embodied cognition may involve different modules for comedies, tragedies, and histories-a.k.a. domain-specific processes that organize our patterns of response to particular kinds of adaptive challenge.
Taken together, these points call to mind a rich body of research on the non-verbal ''dance'' characterizing certain kinds of relationships. If Kaschak and Maner are correct, embodied social cognition may be especially well-articulated for