Continuous methods

According to the embodied cognition perspective, actions reveal a lot about the functioning of our minds because of bi-directional links between perception, cognition, and action. We will present three methods that can be used to continuously trace action, action preparation, and activation of the motor system. We first focus on eye tracking, the most commonly employed of these methods. Taking an active vision perspective leads us to a consideration of spatial attention deployment. We next describe how cognitive, motivational, and emotional states modulate pupil responses. Then we present body and hand tracking, methods that measure more peripheral forms of motor activity. Finally, we introduce grip force measurement as a sensitive tool to record spontaneous fluctuations of manual pressure. For all methods, we include illustrative examples, ranging from action observation and language processing to numerical cognition and spatial attention.