The theory that that cognitive and behavioral development can only be understood as occurring in a body. As such, it grounds much of cognition on an internal model of the human body and its actions. While frequently theories of development focus on abstract algorithms describing information processing, the embodiment view maintains that processing in a body is different because in effect the body itself participates in the information processing. Moreover, the developing body allows the infant or child to explore her environment in different ways at different ages. The theory, allied to dynamical systems approaches, is beginning to have a theoretical impact on the study of development, especially infant development as it relates to object permanence. A sense of the theory is given in the following passage of the biography of the physicist Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988) by James Gleick (1992): “Those who watched Feynman in moments of intense concentration came away with a strong, even disturbing sense of the physicality of the process, as though his brain did not stop with the tray matter but extended through every muscle in his body.”
See Cognitive development, Cognitive psychology, Constraint, Developmental emergence, Dynamical systems approaches, Embodied cognition, Mind-brain problem, Motor development, Object permanence