Embodiment has become an important concept in many areas of cognitive science during the past two decades, but yet there is no common understanding of what actually constitutes embodied cognition. Much focus has been on what kind of ‘bodily realization’ is necessary for embodied cognition, but crucial factors such as the role of social interaction and the body-in-motion have still not received much attention. Based on empirical evidence from child development, we emphasize the experience of self-produced locomotion behavior as a crucial driving force to the emergence of the so-called “ninemonth revolution” in human infants. We argue that the intertwining of social scaffolding and self-produced locomotion behavior is fundamental to the development of joint attention activities and a ‘self’ in the human child.
ISBN: 0-9768318-1-33