On What Embodiment Might Have to do with Cognition

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Without widely accepted and acceptable charac-terisations of what is to be meant by the terms cognition and embodiment, to ask what the role of embodiment in cognition is remains an ill-formed question. The connection between cogni-tion and physical embodiment is however an im-portant issue, and investigating it may well bring some enlightenment to the concepts of cognition and embodiment. In this short paper I offer some observations on what seem to be some important consequences of physical embodiment on the na-ture of cognition, at least cognition as it might need to be in physically embodied agents. These are all derived from my own work on physically embodied mobile robots and point to the need for a dynamical systems approach to understanding cognition, at least in physically embodied agents.