Beyond Embodied Cognition: Intentionality, Affordance, and Environmental Adaptation

Considering that humans must use external tools to solve problems, any account of human cognition should incorporate such intentional tool-using processes into its models of environmental adaptation. In the traditional ecological paradigm and embodied cognitive science, affordances (i.e., possibilities for action which are available for an agent to perceive directly and act upon) are nested in environment (Gibson, 1979). Intentionality is defined as a power of minds that simultaneously coordinates with multiple affordances (e.g., Kiverstein and Rietveld, 2015). Exploring potential mechanisms that are responsible for intentionality would open up new avenues for developing alternative paradigms of psychology on differing assumptions regarding the relationship among mind, body, and environment. This Research Topic is devoted to the particular question; how embodied cognitive processes contribute to the adaptation to a given environment with intentionality.