In this paper we demonstrate (1) how a group of embodied artificial agents can learn to construct abstract conceptual representations of body postures from their continuous sensorimotor interaction with the environment, (2) how they can metaphorically extend these bodily concepts to visual experiences of external objects and (3) how they can use their acquired embodied meanings for self-organizing a communication system about postures and objects. For this, we endow the agents with cognitive mechanisms and structures that are instantiations of specific ideas in cognitive linguistics (namely image schema theory) about how humans relate motor and visual space. We show that the agents are indeed able to perform well in the task and thus the experiment offers a concrete operationalization of these theories and increases their explanatory power.
