Going beyond the cognitivist framing in understanding bodily foundations of mathematical cognition.
Abstract: Recent findings in cognitive neuroscience suggest that cognitive functions are not merely products of isolated functional modules; they are instead facilitated by distributed, transient, and dynamic networks. Furthermore, research on the bodily and evolutionary bases of cognition reveals that our cognitive skills harness capacities originally evolved for action and that cognition is best understood in conjunction with perceptuomotor capacities. Despite these insights, models explaining human mathematical skills struggle to fully capture the relation between cognition and action. This is partially because we have not yet identified sensorimotor building block processes (BBPs) that support numerical skills. A BBP here is identified as a sensorimotor function, associated with a functional network in the brain, and is consistently identified as supporting different cognitive abilities. BBPs can be identified with new approaches to neuroimaging; by examining an array of sensorimotor and cognitive tasks in experimental designs, employing data-driven informatics approaches to data analysis, and interpreting the results considering the evolutionary and bodily foundations of numerical abilities. In this talk, I will review research on sensorimotor foundations of mathematical skills and propose a path for future research. Among other mathematical skills, numerical magnitude processing and its sensorimotor origins will be discussed as a case to substantiate the arguments presented.