Perception as self-organizing interaction: embodied cognition, artificial intelligence, and autism.
Front Psychol March 30, 2026 Gerry Leisman, Raymond Roy, Rahela Alfasi
Perception is not a passive reconstruction of external stimuli but emerges through active, embodied interaction with the environment, according to a theoretical integration of embodied cognition and artificial intelligence. Evidence from neuroscience, developmental psychology, autism research, and AI shows that perceptual meaning arises from lawful relations among bodily constraints, action, and environmental feedback. Recent AI models like embodied reinforcement learning and active inference treat perception as inseparable from action, using closed-loop, predictive systems. The paper argues that embodiment functions as a generative constraint enabling robust sensory cognition. It extends this framework to autism spectrum disorder, proposing that sensory differences reflect variations in embodied self-organization and predictive regulation rather than cognitive deficits. Embodied AI systems could serve as testbeds for exploring these perceptual mechanisms.