TEST: A Tropic, Embodied, and Situated Theory of Cognition

TEST is a novel taxonomy of knowledge representations based on three distinct hierarchically organized representational features: Tropism, Embodiment, and Situatedness. Tropic representational features reflect constraints of the physical world on the agent’s ability to form, reactivate, and enrich embodied (i.e., resulting from the agent’s bodily constraints) conceptual representations embedded in situated contexts. The proposed hierarchy entails that representations can, in principle, have tropic features without necessarily having situated and/or embodied features. On the other hand, representations that are situated and/or embodied are likely to be simultaneously tropic. Hence while we propose tropism as the most general term, the hierarchical relationship between embodiment and situatedness is more on a par, such that the dominance of one component over the other relies on the distinction between offline storage vs. online generation as well as on representation-specific properties.