Grounding cognition in action: expertise, comprehension, and judgment

Recent work demonstrating that both the observation and planning of actions share common neural substrates suggests that merely thinking about action may call upon motor-based neural processes. As a result, higher-level cognitive processes not directly involved with motor production, such as language comprehension or the preference judgments one makes for objects and items in their environment, may be rooted in the sensorimotor systems. In this chapter we not only explore the links between cognition and action, but ask how such cognition-action links may differ as a function of one's experience performing and seeing actions related to the language one hears or the items one is making judgments about. Together, the work presented here suggests that a complete understanding of high-level performance not only requires consideration of how cognition drives action, but vice versa - a bidirectional link between cognition and action.