PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Psycholinguistics
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/flang.2025.1687353
This article is part of the Research TopicEmbodiment in Cognition, Language, and CommunicationView all articles
Seeing and Thinking Groups: Embodied Foundations of Perceptual and Social Structuring
Provisionally accepted- Zefat Academic College, Safed, Israel
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The processes of perceptual organization and social categorization share the goal of simplifying and structuring the world, though they have traditionally been studied within separate branches of psychology. Drawing on embodied cognition, this perspective suggests that both processes stem from bodily experiences. Early sensorimotor experiences, such as being held in proximity or rocked in synchrony, may have shaped the principles of perceptual organization and provide the foundations for social categorization. To integrate these domains, a triadic embodied model is proposed, linking bodily experience, perceptual organization, and social categorization as dynamically interacting vertices. The model allows bidirectional influences, whereby each element can prime and reinforce the others, and may also involve activation of metaphorical concepts. It further explains how cultural context can bias these interconnections. The model situates social categorization along a continuum of representational depth, from shallow symbolic tagging to deep embodied simulation. While prior work has demonstrated dyadic links between bodily experience, perceptual organization, and social categorization, the present article explicitly integrates these domains in a unified model, offering new directions for understanding how people structure their physical and social world.
Keywords: perceptual grouping, Social categorization, Embodied Cognition, organization, Ingroup, outgroup
Received: 17 Aug 2025; Accepted: 11 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Razpurker-Apfeld. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Irene Razpurker-Apfeld, irenea@013.net.il
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