Editorial: The Balanced Triad of Perception, Action, and Cognition

Conceptual distinctions between perception, action, and cognition are convoluted in real world proceedings, as we meander through life, tied to past thoughts and actions, oriented toward future goals, guided by current perceptions. The research topic " Perception, Action, and Cognition " aimed to go beyond the already established perception-action links to study the role of cognitive mechanisms in this triad. A popular way of conceptualizing the triad of perception, action, and cognition is the idea of embodied cognition. The first section entitled " Embodied cognition " presents seven articles related to this concept. In the leading article, Hommel develops an efficient way to conceptualize embodied cognition using the Theory of Event Coding (TEC) framework. Arguing against the anti-cognitivist stance of many embodiment theorists, he firmly puts cognition back in the perception-action link, by maintaining the importance and involvement of internal representations in the production of actions. Vernon et al. propose that perception-action coupling is not only manifest in the behavioral arena, but also shows up in the internal processes of the agents, particularly those related to the self. The self-organizing, self-producing, and self-maintaining processes explain the reciprocity of perception and action. The sense of presence, which is the focus of the article by Triberti and Riva actually implies the presence of the " self " in the environment where perception-action coupling is manifest. Brizio and Tirassa go a step further to expound on how the mind is rooted in the self, particularly the biological self. They offer a taxonomy of control systems based on whether they are intentional, non-intentional, or meta-intentional, drawing on arguments from diverse disciplines ranging from psychology to biology to philosophy to artificial intelligence. The next two articles provide evidence for embodied cognition from clinical samples. Dreyer et al. report evidence from two patients with focal lesions, regarding sensorimotor systems in the cortex being crucial for the processing of semantic concepts, suggesting that without intact perceptual-motor systems, meaningful cognition is all but impossible. Wolpe et al. show that Parkinsons' Disease (PD) patients with higher levodopa dose equivalent show an abnormally high awareness of their actions and their positive outcomes, providing evidence for intact action systems feeding perceptual awareness. Finally, evidence regarding action being important for cognition also comes from a cross cultural study by Wang et al. who studied children's use of imitation in learning how to categorize objects. They propose that imitation of an action leads …