Simulating the elimination of simulation: The case of language comprehension.

In her target article Tina Iachini (2011) proposes to adopt an embodied multimodal approach to account for classical psychological and more recent neuroscientific results on mental imagery. Her proposal is challenging, and I share with the author the persuasion that the times are mature to introduce and defend an embodied approach to mental imagery. While the challenge has well known antecedents in the area of motor imagery (e.g., Jeannerod, 1994), it strikes me as quite new if we consider the research field of mental imagery as a whole (for a related proposal see Grush, 2004). Even though I deeply appreciate the effort made by the author to combine the two perspectives, my task here consists of addressing some unsolved issues that I think should be pointed out. Therefore in my commentary I will briefly start with three critical observations/proposals, then I will focus on a crucial point: the notion of simulation.