Dynamic Touch as Common Ground for Enactivism and Ecological Psychology.
Frontiers in psychology January 1, 2020 David Travieso, Lorena Lobo, Carlos De Paz et al. 20 citations
Enactivism and ecological psychology share more common ground than is often recognized, as illustrated by the example of dynamic touch—a form of touch involving muscles and tendons that allows perception of hand-held objects wielded but not seen. Dynamic touch necessarily implies active exploration because perceivers perform wielding movements with effort. The example has been formalized at the level of laws governing the organism-environment system, providing empirically supported instantiations of sensorimotor contingencies (in enactivist terms) and intentional exploration and information detection (in ecological terms). It also exemplifies the enactivist concepts of bringing-forth the world and sense-making. The article also clarifies key ecological concepts of invariance and affordance, highlighting the crucial difference between perceiving and actualizing affordances for dialogue between the approaches.