The notion of mediated action is fundamental to understanding how features of
the social, cultural and material environment restructure the mental functioning of the
individual [24]. Mediated action may be defined broadly as action in which individuals
make opportunistic use, consciously or unconsciously, of features of the environment to
transform symbols into meanings. In blurring the boundaries between the internal and
external worlds of the individual, we can discuss how humans capitalize on features of
the environment to offload some of the cognitive work associated with a task. Symbols,
representations and language play a part in cognitive functioning to the extent that they
facilitate communication and free up space in the mind for operations on those symbols.
These cultural tools act as an intermediate agency between the mental processing of the
individual and the object of the mental processing.