Intentional Agency and Imaginative Representations

Abstract

Abstract This chapter provides a review and novel analysis of the literature on toddler cognition based on the principles of intentional agency and imaginative representations. Toddlers begin to make either/or decisions between imagined behavioral options with their imagined environmental outcomes. This requires cognitive representations employed not just to recognize objects and events in the actual world, as are infants’, but to imagine potential actions and outcomes in the possible worlds of thinking and planning. The working hypothesis of this chapter is that what enables this new manner of agentive functioning is the emergence of a new organizational architecture, namely, one that includes a single tier of executive supervision and control. The resulting new form of intentional agency and its underlying architecture have their evolutionary roots in the earliest mammals and are characteristic today of species such as squirrels, rats, and domestic dogs.