Introduction

Cognition has long been considered as a mediator process linking sensory information to behaviour and thus has been segregated from processes involved in either perception or action. As underlined by Barsalou (1999), classical theories of cognition assume that knowledge resides in a semantic memory system separate from the brain’s modal systems for perception, action, and mental states. Accordingly, mainstream views of cognitive systems have often been committed to the classical “sandwich model” of cognition, which separates inputs and outputs from the mind (Hurley, 1998). One of the main tenets of these theories is that information provided by the external world is transduced into amodal symbols associated with knowledge stored in semantic memory. When this knowledge is activated, it supports the spectrum of cognitive processes from perception to thought (Barsalou, 2008).