Abstract

Embodied approaches to cognition have touched all corners of the mind, including higher‐level judgmental processes such as social evaluation, moral reasoning and theory of mind. After further characterizing and reviewing the evidence for moderately embodied visual perception, the chapter argues that such evidence does not at all support the moderate approach to embodied cognition, even when the relevant studies and accompanying theories are taken at face value. Even if body‐related factors do influence visual perception ‐ and indeed even if spatial perception is sometimes “body‐scaled” ‐ the author shows that the prevailing theories of such body‐based influences understand these effects in ways that exclude them as instances of moderately embodied cognition. The most favorable solution, then, is to accept that body‐based scaling in visual perception of which the “embodied perception” findings are intended as an example ‐ does not meet the moderate approach's criteria for embodiment.