Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Tim Elmo Feiten
46 citations
A unified framework combining ecological psychology and enactivism could challenge the cognitivist paradigm, but a conceptual tension arises from ecological psychology's realism versus enactivism's constructivist view that organisms enact their own worlds. The biologist Jakob von Uexküll's concept of Umwelt, describing how an organism's sensory physiology shapes its experience, has been proposed as a bridge. However, critics argue Umwelt is steeped in representationalism, incompatible with radical embodied cognition. This paper distinguishes two uses of Umwelt—one emphasizing subjective experience, aligned with Uexküll's philosophical project, and another used in cognitive science debates—and shows how this distinction matters for reconciling ecological and enactive approaches, while providing critical background on Uexküll's compositional theory of meaning.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2010
Michiel van Elk, Marc Slors, Harold Bekkering
46 citations
The paper argues that criticisms of embodied cognition—such as whether sensorimotor brain activation is necessary for language comprehension and how we understand language for which we lack relevant experiences—stem from interpreting embodiment through a cognitivist lens. Instead, the authors propose an enactivist, non-representationalist model: language comprehension is procedural knowledge (knowing how, not knowing that) that enables interaction with others in a shared physical world. On this view, activation in modality-specific brain areas reflects the use of sensorimotor skills, and comprehension is context-bound. The enactivist approach thus supports an embodied view of language while avoiding the problems faced by cognitivist interpretations.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2017
Anne Giersch, Aaron L Mishara
45 citations
Disturbances in unconscious, automatic processing may contribute to abnormal conscious experiences in schizophrenia. Three lines of research—on spatial frequency processing, unpleasant information, and time-event structure—show impairments at both unconscious and conscious levels. The authors argue that examining unconscious physiological and automatic processing separately from conscious processing is a necessary first step to understanding how conscious distortions emerge. Phenomenological psychiatry supports this view, linking impairments in the minimal self—a tacit, non-verbal sense of bodily presence shaped by unconscious processes—to clinical symptoms. Alterations in these unconscious mechanisms may affect the feeling of being a unique individual, justifying a focus on unconscious processes distinct from conscious ones.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2017
Andrea Schiavio, Dylan Van der Schyff, Silke Kruse-Weber et al.
44 citations
The paper argues that early musical behaviors in infants can be understood through the 4E approach to cognition—embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. Drawing on observational research by François Delalande and Piaget's play stages, the authors introduce "teleomusicality," goal-directed behaviors for exploring and playing with sounds, distinct from earlier "protomusicality" (music-like utterances and emotional interactions not focused on sound itself). A shift from protomusicality to teleomusicality occurs between 6 and 10 months of age, marked by an attentive shift. The framework includes Original Teleomusical Acts (OTAs) seen in exploratory behaviors and Constituted Teleomusical Acts (CTAs), which involve more complex goal-directed chains for musical activity.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Edmund T Rolls
43 citations
The global workspace hypothesis of consciousness faces problems, including how global the workspace must be for consciousness to emerge. Carruthers's (2019) version, which excludes conceptual representations and reduces phenomenal consciousness to physical processes, is also challenged. A different levels-of-explanation approach to the brain-mind relation is advocated. An alternative theory proposes a computational system using Higher Order Syntactic Thoughts (HOST) to perform credit assignment on first-order thoughts of multi-step plans by manipulating symbols in syntactic working memory. This provides an evolutionary reason for such a module, with which phenomenal consciousness is associated. The HOST approach offers advantages over global workspace and Higher Order Thought theories, and may involve prefrontal cortex regions, especially the left inferior frontal gyrus.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Larraitz N Zumeta, Pablo Castro-Abril, Lander Méndez et al.
40 citations
Participation in International Women's Day demonstrations on 8 March 2020 is associated with positive personal and collective well-being outcomes, mediated by psychological mechanisms including perceived emotional synchrony, behavioral synchrony, and transcendent emotions. A cross-cultural survey of 2,854 people from nine Latin American and European countries compared demonstration participants with non-demonstrators who followed via media. Female and non-binary participants reported stronger effects than males. Meta-analyses showed perceived emotional synchrony consistently linked to both proximal mechanisms and well-being measures. Sequential moderation analyses indicated that the proposed mechanisms fully mediated the effects of participation on affective well-being, personal growth beliefs, social integration, collective efficacy, and intentions to support women's rights, consistent with a Durkheimian collective ritual framework.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Catherine Read, Agnes Szokolszky
40 citations
Ecological Psychology and Enactivism both oppose representation-based cognitive science but differ fundamentally in their theories of sensation and perception. Ecological theory holds that perception is not based on sensation, a point illustrated through retinal image theories and perception in single-celled organisms. The paper emphasizes organism-environment mutuality, contrasting it with the structural coupling of sensations and motor behavior in Enactivism. Ecological-phenomenological methods arise from mutualism, linking Gibson's visual kinesthesis to Merleau-Ponty's lived body. The authors conclude that convergence is impossible due to conflicting assumptions, but cross-fertilization between the approaches is possible and desirable.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Miguel Segundo-Ortin
39 citations
Agency—the capacity to act—remains a puzzle for non-representationalist theories of mind. Ecological psychologists and enactivists both locate agency in the organism–environment relation but emphasize different aspects. This theoretical paper proposes a radical embodied account that merges the two approaches: enactivism explains how acquired sensorimotor schemes and habits mutually equilibrate, biasing which affordances an agent acts upon, while ecological psychology shows how perceptual information actualizes those schemes without requiring internal representations, inferences, or computations. The account suggests that socio-cultural norms shape agency by influencing this ecological-enactive dynamic.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2022
Helané Wahbeh, Dean Radin, Cedric Cannard et al.
37 citations
Consciousness remains a profound mystery. Mainstream neuroscience assumes it arises solely from brain neurons, but the origin of subjective experience (qualia) is unexplained. David Chalmers called this the 'hard problem.' This review argues the hard problem may stem from flawed materialist assumptions. It examines phenomena suggesting consciousness can extend beyond the brain and body in space and time, called non-local properties. These effects vaguely resemble quantum entanglement, but mechanisms are highly speculative. The authors suggest post-materialistic models may be needed to resolve the conceptual impasse.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2021
Piers Worth, Matthew D Smith
36 citations
Self-transcendence is proposed as a way to find relief and support during COVID-19 and other times of uncertainty, but its multiple existing definitions are complex, obscure, and imprecisely spiritual, making it excluding for wider populations. This critical summary review examines historical foundations and key theoretical approaches to self-transcendence and self-transcendent experiences, aiming for clarity. The authors argue that clearer understanding can make self-transcendence an inclusive, democratized resource for supporting well-being and resilience in the context of COVID and beyond.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2015
Dylan Van der Schyff
36 citations
The enactive approach to cognition offers a relational, bio-cultural perspective on music that moves beyond Western reliance on language, symbol, and representation as primary sources of meaning. This life-based view provides an alternative to standard academic music education by emphasizing the embodied, transformative, and interpenetrative nature of the musical mind, helping reconnect students and teachers to lived experience. Concepts from Buddhist psychology further develop possibilities for a contemplative music pedagogy. An enactive-contemplative perspective may help students and teachers rediscover music as a manifestation of life, fostering richer, more compassionate relationships with peers, communities, and the natural and cultural worlds.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2013
Jake Quilty-Dunn
36 citations
Thomas Reid's theory of perception holds that conscious perception consists of a non-intentional sensation accompanied by a noninferential perceptual belief. For olfactory perception and odors as secondary qualities, this creates a tension: Reid seems to require that we infer odors from sensations, which would preclude direct, noninferential perceptual awareness of odors. The paper argues that Reid's doctrine of "acquired perception"—where learned conceptual representations become incorporated into perceptual states via perceptual learning—resolves this tension. Acquired perception allows genuine olfactory perceptual acquaintance with odors, even though the semantic properties of the representations depend on causal relations to sensations. Reid's account of olfaction remains a coherent option for contemporary philosophy of perception.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Johannes Jaeger, Anna Riedl, Alex Djedovic et al.
35 citations
Organisms solve problems in a way that fundamentally differs from algorithmic computation. Before an organism can apply logical rules, it must first determine what is relevant—turning ill-defined problems into well-defined ones. This ability to realize relevance is present in all living beings, from bacteria to humans, and arises from their autopoietic, anticipatory, and adaptive organization. The process of relevance realization cannot be fully captured by formal algorithms, implying that organismic agency, cognition, and consciousness are not computational in nature. Instead, relevance is realized through an adaptive, emergent triadic dialectic—a metabolic and ecological-evolutionary co-constructive dynamic—that allows an agent to continuously maintain a grip on its reality. Being alive means making sense of one's world through embodied ecological rationality, a key characteristic distinguishing life from non-living matter.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2021
Elmarie Venter
35 citations
Predictive processing theories of the brain have split into two opposing camps: cognitivist predictive processing, which restricts cognition to neural processes, and free energy enactivism, which extends free energy minimization to all self-organizing systems and offers no unique explanation for complex human cognition. This paper rejects both extremes and proposes Embodied, Embedded Predictive Processing (EEPP), a compromise that distinguishes prediction error minimization from the free energy principle. EEPP gives the body a constitutive role in cognition: it regulates cognitive activity, distributes cognitive load by minimizing prediction error, and constrains processed information. The embodied agent, as a model of its econiche, minimizes free energy through bidirectional agent–environment interaction, making EEPP a promising alternative.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Matthew Crippen
34 citations
A pragmatic reading reconciles the apparent conflict between ecological psychology's realism and enactivism's constructivism by showing that constructivism need not be subjectivist. The slime mold Physarum polycephalum illustrates this: it builds chemical barriers from its own slime trails, then avoids them during foraging, coordinating around self-created affordance-bearing geographies that nonetheless exist independently. For ecological psychologists, affordances are values external to the perceiver; agent-enacted values have the same status and do not imply subjectivism. The debate centers on whether emphasis falls on inner constitution or environmental structure. Considering loops involving environment, brain, visceral systems, and gut bacteria reveals mutual internal-external synchronization that can invert values without subjectivism, showing enactivism can enrich ecological accounts of value.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2021
Joerg Fingerhut
33 citations
The still-emerging paradigm of situated cognition requires a more systematic perspective on media to capture how culture shapes the mind. Cultural artifacts, as media, provide central experiential models for embodied minds. The paper identifies references to external media within embodied, extended, enactive, and predictive approaches to cognition, which underdevelop media's profound impact. To address this, an enactive account of media is proposed, based on expansive habits as media-structured, embodied ways of bringing forth meaning. These habits, applied when seeing a picture or perceiving a movie, become established through reciprocal adaptation between media artifacts and organisms.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Eros Moreira de Carvalho, Giovanni Rolla
32 citations
Information is central to cognitive science and neuroscience, but its meaning for a cognitive system acquiring information about its surroundings is debated. This theoretical paper argues that the ecological psychology concept of information for action can be understood as covariant information, as developed by some enactivists. Learning to perceive this covariant information involves minimizing uncertainty through skilled performance, aligning with Shannon's idea of uncertainty reduction. The authors propose that an agent's cognitive system conveys information for acting by minimizing uncertainty about achieving intended goals. They review empirical findings showing that direct learning, an instance of ecological rationality, transforms mere possibilities for action into embodied know-how, and note its affinity with sense-making activity.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2023
Alejandro Troncoso, Vicente Soto, Antoni Gomila et al.
31 citations
Empathy, crucial for social interaction, is often studied in controlled lab settings that miss its real-world complexity. This article proposes an integrative framework called the Empirical 5E (E5E) approach, which combines embodied, embedded, enacted, emotional, and extended perspectives of empathy. The authors argue for studying empathy as an active interaction between embodied agents in a shared environment. They illustrate how a multimodal method—mobile brain and body imaging (MoBi) paired with phenomenological techniques and natural interactive paradigms—can capture both neural and bodily processes alongside subjective experience. This framework aims to bridge brain, body, and phenomenological attributes to better reflect how empathy actually occurs in everyday life.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Sergio A Mota-Rolim, Kelly Bulkeley, Stephany Campanelli et al.
31 citations
Religions have long recognized lucid dreaming (LD) as an important conscious state, predating modern scientific study by millennia. Hindu texts over 2,000 years old divide consciousness into waking, dreaming (including LD), and deep sleep. Tibetan Buddhists practice Dream Yoga to recognize dreams, overcome fears, and control dream content. Islam regards LD as a valuable mental state for mystical experiences. Christian theologian Augustine described LD as a preview of the afterlife. Spiritism in the nineteenth century linked LD to out-of-body experiences. Abrahamic religions view dreams as communication with God, while Indian traditions cultivate self-awareness through LD induction techniques. These historical religious insights can inform current scientific research on LD phenomenology.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Brigitte Holzinger, Bernd Saletu, Gerhard Klösch
30 citations
Lucid dreaming therapy (LDT) did not improve sleep quality or reduce nightmare severity in patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but it significantly decreased levels of anxiety and depression. About 80% of PTSD patients suffer from nightmares or dysphoric dreams. LDT teaches dreamers to become aware of and control dream content, offering a potential alternative or complementary treatment for PTSD-related anxiety and depression, even though it had no effect on sleep variables or the PTSD profile measured by the Impact of Events Scale.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Amanda Corris
29 citations
Enactivism and ecological psychology both emphasize that perceiving organisms actively shape their relationship with the environment rather than passively receiving stimuli. However, neither approach specifies the structure of the environment beyond its contingent links to species-typical sensorimotor capacities. This leaves a gap in understanding how organisms are organized as coupled with their environments. Drawing on developmental systems theory, the environment can be defined as a developmental niche that both shapes and is shaped by individual organisms over developmental and evolutionary time. Specifying the environment as a developmental niche clarifies how and why certain contingencies arise, strengthening the joint appeal to enactivism and ecological psychology as complementary theories of organism–environment coupling.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2019
Michal Polák, Tomáš Marvan
29 citations
The hard problem of consciousness—explaining why and how physical processes give rise to subjective experience—may be partly an artifact of assuming that consciousness and phenomenality (the quality of subjective experience) are inseparable. Rejecting this assumption and adopting a non-unitary view, in which consciousness and phenomenality can come apart, does not eliminate the hard problem but reframes it, making the explanatory task more tractable and reducing the apparent mystery. The paper sketches additional advantages of this non-unitary account.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2018
Wanja Wiese
29 citations
A meta-theoretical analysis examines the method of interdisciplinary constraint satisfaction (MICS) introduced in Metzinger's Being No One, which combines phenomenological, representationalist, and neurobiological perspectives to study consciousness. Despite this approach's promise, a mature science of consciousness remains elusive more than a decade later. The paper identifies hurdles MICS has yet to overcome, evaluates how existing approaches address these gaps, and argues that a unifying theory integrating different features of consciousness is necessary for progress.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Yanna B Popova, Joanna Rączaszek-leonardi
28 citations
Ecological psychology and enactivism, despite sharing roots in embodied cognition, have diverged in how they understand embodied experience. This paper argues that recognizing these differences can lead to a more integrated approach to agency, social cognition, and art reception. The authors propose a synergy where ecological psychology incorporates felt experience as a dynamic element in its models, while enactivism accounts for directly perceived relations arising from enactments in the social and physical world. Such complementarity is not only possible but already emerging, potentially overcoming current divisions of responsibility in cognitive science.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2023
Mansee Thakur, Yogesh Patil, Sanjana T Philip et al.
27 citations
A 3-month randomized trial with 100 healthy adults aged 18-24 found that practicing Heartfulness meditation significantly reduced cortisol levels and anxiety, while increasing well-being and mindfulness as measured by standard questionnaires. Perceived stress decreased but not significantly. Telomere length correlated negatively with cortisol and positively with well-being, suggesting meditation may slow cellular aging. The authors conclude Heartfulness meditation can improve mental health and affect telomere length, though larger studies are needed to confirm.