Mind and motion: surveying successes and stumbles in looking ahead

This concluding chapter is written as an exercise in evaluative and formative outcome assessment for the workshop that produced the individual content chapters in this edited volume (entitled Mind and motion: the bidirectional link between thought and action; 29-31 May 2008; Bielefeld, Germany). We go beyond simply summarizing and reiterating the academic progress that was made in each group that is presented in the group reports. Rather, we focus on the obstacles that we encountered along the way in hopes of recognizing what may impede future progress in the study of motor-cognitive links. In particular, we identified three key challenges that arose during our workshop discussions: the limitations of a reductionist tendency, the myopia associated with disciplinary biases, and the threats to inferential validity when dealing with mental phenomena. We offer prescriptive advice about how to overcome these limitations and provide a template for future interaction by interdisciplinary researchers who want to continue scientific research in this domain.