Action-oriented theories of cognition: definitions, debates, and implications for human movement science

Action has long been considered a side issue for cognition, relegated to the role of output. More recently, cognitive science has increasingly positioned action at the centre of our understanding of the mind, seeing cognition as an active process of creating meaning through dynamic organism-environment interactions. This is true for both more radical embodied and enactive theories (e.g., Ecological Psychology) as well as more computational approaches (e.g., Predictive Processing). As human movement science too often lacks a firm theoretical foundation, these ideas are attracting interest and sparking debate among researchers. There is, however, often confusion about particular theoretical positions and their points of difference. In this paper, we therefore provide an accessible overview of a range of theoretical positions, to identify key similarities and differences, and discuss the exciting convergence on the importance of action. The overriding implication of these theories is that cognitive states, perceptual processes, and their neural underpinnings need to be studied with respect to their functional role in action generation. Consequently, not only can human movement science researchers benefit from adopting these ideas for a better theoretical grounding, but they are best placed to actually perform the empirical work of testing these ideas.