Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

embodied theory of gestured meaning. Both the static/classical and dynamic/
embodied parts of McNeill’s theory are involved with conveying meaning. They
occur at the same time and are therefore co-expressive, but they are not redundant:
“gesture and speech express the same underlying idea unit but express it in their
own ways—their own aspects of it, and when they express overlapping aspects they
do so in distinctive ways” (p. 33). By exploiting two very different approaches in
cognitive science, McNeill is clearly providing a hybrid model.
One hybrid model different in nature from McNeill’s (2005) is one in which
multiple theoretical approaches are applied in succession. For example, theories of
perception often involve different stages of processing (e.g., visual detection, visual
cognition, object recognition [Treisman, 1988]). Perhaps one stage of such processing
is best described by one kind of theory (e.g., a connectionist theory of visual
detection) while a later stage is best described by a different kind of theory (e.g., a
symbolic model of object recognition). One such theory of seeing and visualizing
favoured by Pylyshyn (2003c, 2007) is discussed in detail as an example of a hybrid
cognitive science in Chapter 8.
358 Chapter 7