He is the author of Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension" (Oxford University Press, 2008).
In 2008s Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension, Clark wrote: It matters that we recognize the very large extent to which individual human thought and reason are not activities that occur solely in the brain… it drives home the degree to which environmental engineering is also self-engineering.
This distinction between embodiment and embodied action is important because if embodiment is ultimately a brain-based phenomenon, then embodied actions represent the physical antecedents of the embodied mind.
Although theories of embodied cognition have been around for decades, there is no singular view of what is meant by the term "embodiment" or embodied action (Anderson, 2003).
What should be foregrounded in studies of embodiment is what we will accept as evidence of embodiment and, for those invested in learning, what serves as acceptable evidence that instruction via embodied action leads to a student embodying a concept that they had not embodied before.
The development of spatial thinking and the extent to which domain-relevant spatial concepts and processes of reasoning can be fostered through embodied action remain underexplored and warrant investigations in parallel to efforts that focus on the social nature of embodiment.
As we consider learning through embodied actions and what embodiment of conceptual knowledge looks like as an outcome of learning, we are likely to find a similar rich diversity beneath the surface.
Embodied actions, as the name suggests, are related to embodiment (and in fact, deeply so), but the distinction between the two is important.
While the research field settles on the evidentiary basis of claims of embodiment, arguably the best source of evidence at our disposal may be in both observing the visible manifestations of embodiment as well as experimentally manipulating the availability of embodied actions in an intervention.
Manipulating the availability of embodied actions provides a way to observe the connection between embodied actions and embodiment (i.e., offline simulation), especially when those taught to use their body on a task still outperform a control group in the absence of overt movement.
However, despite the benefits we stand to gain from studying embodiment as it plays out in situ, we also argue that our knowledge of how and when embodied actions best support spatial thinking are still poorly understood and it is necessary to first investigate these mechanisms through appropriate reductionism (cf. Núñez, 2012).
