The cognitive sciences are increasingly coming to terms with the embodied, embedded, extended, and experiential aspects of the mind. Exemplifying this shift, the enactive approach points to an essential role of goal-directed bodily activity in the generation of meaningful perceptual experience, i.e., sense-making. Here, building on recent insights into the transformative effects of practical tool- use, we make use of the enactive approach in order to provide a definition of an enactive interface in terms of augmented sense- making. We introduce such a custom-built interface, the Enactive Torch, and present a study of its experiential effects. The results demonstrate that the user experience is not adequately captured by any standardly assumed perceptual modality; rather, it is a new feeling that is mediated by the design of the device and shaped by the overall situation of the task. Taken together these findings show that there is much to be gained by synergies between engineering and the cognitive sciences in the creation of new experience- centered technology. We suggest that the guiding principle should be the design of interfaces that serve as a transparent medium for augmenting our natural skills of interaction with the world, instead of requiring conscious attention to the interface as an opaque object in the world.

Excerpt: I suggest that progress can be made on such a theory of goals and action by adapting the dynamic systems theory put forward by Alica Juarrero (1999). Juarrero has put for a theory which identifies our intentions and goals as attractors in the dynamic phase space of the brain. This provides a means of understanding the implicit and situated nature of actions and their goals. However, Juarrero’s view is overly neuro-centric for the enactive approach, adopting a connectionist but representational view of the meaning which transforms “mere” behaviour in to action. In this paper I put forward some suggestions which would both allow us to adapt Juarrero’s theory for a more deeply embodied and enactive cognitive science, and provide a means of more completely characterising an enactive psychology.

The enactive approach to cognitive science involves frequent references to “action” without making clear what is intended by the term. In particular, though autopoiesis is seen as a foundation for teleology in the enactive literature, no definition or account is offered of goals which can encompass not just descriptions of biological maintenance, but the range of social and cultural activities in which human beings continually engage. The present paper draws primarily on the work of Juarrero (Dynamics in action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999) and Donald (Origins of the modern mind. London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1991) in an attempt to offer the broad outlines of an account of goals and goal-directedness which is consistent with the enactive approach and which explicates several forms of goal-directedness exhibited by human beings. Four stages of cognitive evolution described by Donald are examined for characteristic mechanisms of adaptivity and goal-directedness. Implications for an enactive theory of meaning are discussed.

Key words: Goals, enaction, teleology, meaning, adaptivity, action, embodiment

Perceptual modalities have been traditionally considered the product of dedicated biological systems producing information for higher cognitive processing. Psychological and neuropsychological evidence is offered which undermines this point of view and an alternative account of modality from the enactive approach to understanding cognition is suggested. Under this view, a perceptual modality is a stable form of perception which is structured not just by the biological sensitivities of the agent, but by their goals and the set of skills or expertise which they are deploying at a given time. Such a view suggests that there is no such thing as an experience that is purely visual, auditory, or otherwise modal and that our attempts to understand consciousness and the mind must be conducted within a framework that provides an account of embodied, goal-directed adaptive coping with the world. Relevance: This paper provides an enactive analysis of perceptual modality, and argues for a more constructivist view of how consciousness is analysed, specifically according to the skilled activities in which an agent is engaged.

Embodied approaches to cognitive science frequently describe the mind as “world-involving,” indicating complementary and interdependent relationships between an agent and its environment. The precise nature of the environment is frequently left ill-described, however, and provides a challenge for such approaches, particularly, it is noted here, for the enactive approach which emphasizes this complementarity in quite radical terms. This paper argues that enactivists should work to find common cause with a dynamic form of ecological psychology, a theoretical perspective that provides the most explicit theory of the psychological environment currently extant. In doing so, the intersubjective, cultural nature of the ecology of human psychology is explored, with the challenges this poses for both enactivist and ecological approaches outlined. The theory of behavior settings (Barker, 1968; Schoggen, 1989) is used to present a framework for resolving some of these challenges. Drawing these various strands together an outline of a radical embodied account of intersubjectivity and social activity is presented.

Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: Fultot, Nie, and Carello are correct that enactive researchers should be more aware of the research literature on ecological psychology, but their charge of mental construction is off-target. Enactivism and ecological psychology are compatible frameworks with different, complementary, emphases.

Open peer commentary on the article “Varela’s Radical Proposal: How to Embody and Open Up Cognitive Science” by Kristian Moltke Martiny. Upshot: Varela’s proposal that science should be open to the phenomena of experience is radical primarily because of the strangely constrained practices of psychological science. Methodological and professional crises within contemporary psychological science resonate with the issues raised by Varela and others, and addressing them effectively will mean following Varela’s, and Martiny’s, advice.

Excerpt: In his article ‘From sensorimotor dependencies to perceptual practices: making enactivism social’, Alejandro Arango presents a case for socialising enactive percep-tion. While noting the importance of understanding perception as embodied, he argues that addressing just the issues of embodiment is not enough, that the socially situated and conditioned character of bodies, and the practices involved in perception, must be given full account.

Can we see the expressiveness of other people’s gestures, hear the intentions in their voice, see the emotions in their posture? Traditional theories of social cognition still say we cannot because intentions and emotions for them are hidden away inside and we do not have direct access to them. Enactive theories still have no idea because they have so far mainly focused on perception of our physical world. We surmise, however, that the latter hold promise since, in trying to understand cognition, enactive theory focuses on the embodied engagements of a cognizer with his world. In this paper, we attempt an answer for the question: What is social perception in an enactive account? In enaction, perception is conceived as a skill, crucially involving action (perception is action and action is perception), an ability to work successfully within the set of regularities, or contingencies, that characterize a given domain. If this is the case, then social perception should be a social skill. Having thus transformed the question of what social perception is into that of what social skill is, we examine the concept of social contingencies and the manner in which social skills structure – both constrain and empower – social interaction. Some of the implications of our account for how social and physical perception differ, the role of embodiment in social interaction and the distinction between our approach and other social contingency theories are also addressed. Relevance: This paper provides an outline of an approach to social perception grounded in sensorimotor and enactive approaches, particularly the participatory sense-making approach of De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007). It also provides links between enactive approaches to social activity and the constructivist views of cultural psychologists such as Jerome Bruner.

The enactive approach to cognitive science aims to provide an account of the mind that is both naturalistic and nonreductive. Psychological activity is viewed not as occurring within the individual organism but in the engagement between the motivated autonomous agent and their context (including their social context). The approach has been developing within the fields of philosophy, artificial life, and computational biology for the past two decades and is now growing within the domain of psychology more generally. In this short paper we outline the conceptual framework of the enactive approach. Illustrative research questions and methods for investigation are also broached, including some existing examples from theoretical, behavioral, and computational modeling research. It is suggested that an enactive psychology provides the basis for the conceptual framework of the enactive approach. Relevance: This paper defines a “enactive psychology” to describe the complex of relations between a cognitive agent and their environment.

Key words: Enactive approach, enaction, unifying psychology, theory of psychology, perception-action systems.