ABSTRACT
Embodied or 4E cognition (EC) approaches emphasize the defining and constitutive role that the body plays in mental activities. Sport psychologists are inclined to embrace EC because it appreciates how a full range of human experience that includes the affective, perceptual, and motoric, just the intellectual, constitutes legitimate cognitive activity. Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mental functions and intelligent systems at the level of their underlying processes and mechanisms. The premises of cognitivism are internalist, instructionist, symbolicist, and largely intellectualist, as they reduce even the most basic forms of practical know-how to temporally abstract, purely syntactic, amodal information processing. The fundamental principle of EC is that the reach and the very nature of mental functions constitutively depend on the material and temporal details of their implementation, including the history of interactions between the embodied agent and its world.
