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Becoming an intentional agent : Introduction

Our behavior is commonly much more driven by our intentions and goals than by particular stimuli or situations. That is, we are used to experiencing and interpreting goal-directed actions of others, and carrying out goal-directed actions by ourselves. This special issue addresses the question of how we can do this. How can we intend to reach a particular goal, translate this goal into appropriate ways to move our body, and how do we understand that other people do the same? Cognitive developmental approaches to the perception and production of intentional action have yielded major insights during the last two decades or so. However, there is room for improvement with respect to the communication between developmental studies, general cognitive or neurocognitive models and approaches to action control. This issue aims to provide a representative overview of both empirical and theoretical achievements within the developmental study of action perception and production for a broader cognitive and neurocognitive readership. The developmental process of understanding self and others as intentional agents is by no means a new question. To what extent one can have direct access to his or her intentional states, the ways in which one can distinguish self from the external world, how one’s own experience leads to inferences about others’ mental states are just some of the questions that have been discussed by the early and current thinkers of philosophy of mind, and that are inherently related to the issue of what it takes to become an intentional agent. Current developmental theoretical accounts on the emergence of understanding intentional actions are influenced by the different views philosophers have towards these issues (e.g., Davidson, 1963; Dennett, 1991; Fodor, 1987; Searle, 1983), and also reflect current cognitive models of the representation of intentional action (e.g., Hommel, Müsseler, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001; James, 1890; Jeannerod, 1999; Prinz, 1997). A fully developed form of understanding of self and others as intentional agents implies the ability to interpret and predict one’s own and others’ actions in terms of intentional mental states such as desires and beliefs (‘theory of mind’). The origins and the developmental unfolding of this understanding and the possible mechanisms that are responsible for its emergence are central issues in cognitive infancy research. Recent methodological and theoretical breakthroughs have led to a rapid growth of our insights into these