This book compiles and explains the key terms and core concepts related to embodied cognition in an easy-to-navigate A–Z format. Research in embodied cognition has grown organically over the past decades, and as a result, there is an abundance of technical concepts, schools of thought, and theoretical proposals that partly overlap, partly complement, and sometimes even contradict each other. To this day, there is no overarching guiding text that attempts to provide readers with sufficient tools to make sense of this complex conceptual landscape. Filling this gap, A–Z of Embodied Cognition leads with an introductory historical essay that describes the evolution of embodied cognitive science and its scientific and philosophical contexts and predecessors. It then moves on to the A–Z entries, which showcase key technical concepts, theoretical proposals, models, and hypotheses. As a collective, these entries provide an overview of the similarities and differences between various active perspectives such as extended functionalism, ecological psychology, and the enactive approach, as well as highlighting current research challenges, questions, and debates. The entries also highlight cross-references and recommendations for further reading. Encouraging readers to critically engage with key topics in embodied cognition, this innovative book will be of great interest to students and early-career researchers of psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. Given the fragmented state of research in embodied cognition, the book will also be useful to more advanced practitioners in helping communicate across terminological gaps.

Ezequiel A. Di Paolo is a research professor working at Ikerbasque, the Basque Science Foundation in Spain, and a visiting professor at the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex. His interdisciplinary work on embodied and enactive approaches to life, mind, and society integrates work from cognitive science, neuroscience, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and computational modeling. His research focus is on enactive theory, embodied intersubjectivity, language, ethics, and participatory sense-making. He is (co-)author of over 200 publications, including the books Sensorimotor Life: An Enactive Proposal (2017) and Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity between Life and
Language (2018). He is co-editor of the annotated edition of Francisco Varela’s Principles of Biological Autonomy (2025).