Session: Towards a motricity approach in cognitive sciences (González, Vergara, Argüelles, Gastelum, Padua, Yañez)

Ximena González Grandón and Jimena Vergara Ortega

 There is a tough tendency in recent embodied proposals to rely on neural correlations, such as so-called mirror neuron when explaining social learning, theory of mind or the generation of consciousness through evolution. Unfortunately, such explanations are grounded in the bottom-up perspectives and do not address the need to see the motor interaction as a structured and structuring process. These explanations remain within the problem of (1) how a detached subject is trying to apprehend the other and (2) if it is shaped by motor coordination dynamics. So, they are just transferring their cause to a neural correlation and simply re-describing the problem. We want to make a proposal grounded in a historical explanation and an embodied and ecological approach, about the experience of self-movement –kinaesthesia– as central to mental animate life. In humans and non-human primates, as autonomous organisms, kinaesthesia and tactility are the first sensorimotor systems to develop. So, in the beginning, movement is not a pre-given program of capacities, but something that they actively learn by moving themselves discovering the possibilities of action of their bodies and correlative spatio-temporal dynamics in every percepto-motor process, within their particular social community (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011). We will sustain that we can get a more coherent explanation of the origin of mental life, if we consider: (1) autonomous agents constantly learning how to move (to walk, to grasp), challenging a kinaesthetically felt coordination dynamics in present time and (2) making sense of their physical and social surroundings.