Ecological Psychology and Enactivism: Perceptually-Guided Action vs. Sensation-Based Enaction

Reaching conceptual stability by re-articulating empirical and theoretical work on affordances

Theoretical developments on affordances have proliferated, resulting in a lack of conceptual stability and a potential compromise in scientific validity. However, affordances should not be discarded, given their centrality in post-cognitive theories and their widespread reuse across various research domains. Empirical research on affordances remains sparse, out of sync with theoretical advancements, and thus unable to contribute effectively to scientific progress due to its disarticulation with theoretical work. That is why re-articulating theoretical and empirical investigations on affordances is needed to pave a more fruitful path for the concept's advancement. To accomplish this objective, emphasis must be placed on empirical research, leveraging recent theoretical propositions and devising corresponding empirical methodologies. The proposed requirements and framework represent a step in this endeavor.

Fading boundaries between the physical and the social world: Insights and novel techniques from the intersection of these two fields

This review focuses on the subtle interactions between sensory input and social cognition in visual perception. We suggest that body indices, such as gait and posture, can mediate such interactions. Recent trends in cognitive research are trying to overcome approaches that define perception as stimulus-centered and are pointing toward a more embodied agent-dependent perspective. According to this view, perception is a constructive process in which sensory inputs and motivational systems contribute to building an image of the external world. A key notion emerging from new theories on perception is that the body plays a critical role in shaping our perception. Depending on our arm's length, height and capacity of movement, we create our own image of the world based on a continuous compromise between sensory inputs and expected behavior. We use our bodies as natural "rulers" to measure both the physical and the social world around us. We point out the necessity of an integrative approach in cognitive research that takes into account the interplay between social and perceptual dimensions. To this end, we review long-established and novel techniques aimed at measuring bodily states and movements, and their perception, with the assumption that only by combining the study of visual perception and social cognition can we deepen our understanding of both fields.

Neuroscience and architecture: Modulating behavior through sensorimotor responses to the built environment

As we move through the world, natural and built environments implicitly guide behavior by appealing to certain sensory and motor dynamics. This process can be motivated by automatic attention to environmental features that resonate with specific sensorimotor responses. This review aims at providing a psychobiological framework describing how environmental features can lead to automated sensorimotor responses through defined neurophysiological mechanisms underlying attention. Through the use of automated processes in subsets of cortical structures, the goal of this framework is to describe on a neuronal level the functional link between the designed environment and sensorimotor responses. By distinguishing between environmental features and sensorimotor responses we elaborate on how automatic behavior employs the environment for sensorimotor adaptation. This is realized through a thalamo-cortical network integrating environmental features with motor aspects of behavior. We highlight the underlying transthalamic transmission from an Enactive and predictive perspective and review recent studies that effectively modulated behavior by systematically manipulating environmental features. We end by suggesting a promising combination of neuroimaging and computational analysis for future studies.

Disturbance of Ecological Self and Impairment of Affordance Perception

Affordance, a radical concept James Gibson introduced in the 1970s, remains controversial today. Defined as environmental properties taken with reference to an animal's anatomy and action capabilities, affordances are opportunities for action the environment offers. By perceiving affordances, organisms hold meaningful relationships with their surroundings. Affordance is not just a theoretical concept but, as the embodiment of meanings and values, has serious psychological implications. We contend that the lack of these meanings and values underlies the irrational behavior seen in patients with self disorders such as schizophrenia. We reason that it is by perceiving affordances that individuals keep in touch with their surroundings and stay mentally healthy. Using contrapositive reasoning, the reverse could also be true. That is, when individuals experience difficulty maintaining meaningful relations with their surroundings and suffer from mental health problems, we might anticipate that their affordance detection systems are impaired. In two studies conducted in our laboratory, patients with schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease were shown to have impaired capacity to perceive affordances, a result qualifying as contra-positive evidence corroborating the affordance concept. In addition, our results provide support for accepting contra-positive evidence as a complementary tool to positive evidence for empirically validating concepts such as affordance and meaning.

Active Inference and Cooperative Communication: An Ecological Alternative to the Alignment View

We present and contrast two accounts of cooperative communication, both based on Active Inference, a framework that unifies biological and cognitive processes. The mental alignment account, defended in Vasil et al., takes the function of cooperative communication to be the alignment of the interlocutor's mental states, and cooperative communicative behavior to be driven by an evolutionarily selected adaptive prior belief favoring the selection of action policies that promote such an alignment. We argue that the mental alignment account should be rejected because it neglects the action-oriented nature of cooperative communication, which skews its view of the dynamics of communicative interaction. We introduce our own conception of cooperative communication, inspired by a more radical ecological interpretation of the active inference framework. Cooperative communication, on our ecological conception, serves to guide and constrain the dynamics of the cooperative interaction via the construction and restructuring of shared fields of affordances, in order to reach the local goals of the joint actions in which episodes of cooperative communication are embedded. We argue that our ecological conception provides a better theoretical standpoint to account for the action-oriented nature of cooperative communication in the active inference framework.

A Systems View of Emotion in Socio-political Context

Most work to date in psychology and related sciences has examined simple, unidirectional causal processes of emotion affecting socio-political context or vice versa. In this classic, mechanistic view of science, each empirical observation stands on its own as a piece of some grander, not yet understandable, puzzle of nature. There have been repeated calls to eschew classic approaches in favor of systems meta-theory in psychology and related sciences. In this paper, we join these calls by arguing that systems meta-theory can better enable the study of emotions in socio-political contexts. We offer a brief primer on systems meta-theory, delineating three key beneficial features: multi-leveled, complex, and dynamic. Viewing emotion as a system of systems-within the person, their relationships (to others), and within the world (locally and globally)-enables fresh theory, method, and statistical analysis well suited to the study of emotion in a socio-political context.

Enactive Pragmatism and Ecological Psychology

A widely cited roadblock to bridging ecological psychology and enactivism is that the former identifies with realism and the latter identifies with constructivism, which critics charge is subjectivist. A pragmatic reading, however, suggests non-mental forms of constructivism that simultaneously fit core tenets of enactivism and ecological realism. After advancing a pragmatic version of enactive constructivism that does not obviate realism, I reinforce the position with an empirical illustration: Physarum polycephalum, a communal unicellular organism that leaves slime trails that form chemical barriers that it avoids in foraging explorations. Here, environmental building and sensorimotor engagement are part of the same process with P. polycephalum coordinating around self-created, affordance-bearing geographies, which nonetheless exist independently in ways described by ecological realists. For ecological psychologists, affordances are values, meaning values are external to the perceiver. I argue that agent-enacted values have the same status and thus do not obviate ecological realism or generate subjectivism. The constructivist-realist debate organizes around the emphasis that enactivists and ecological theorists respectively place on the inner constitution of organisms vs. the structure of environments. Building on alimentary themes introduced in the P. polycephalum example and also in Gibson’s work, I go on to consider how environment, brain, visceral systems, and even bacteria within them enter perceptual loops. This highlights almost unfathomable degrees of mutually modulating internal and external synchronization. It also shows instances in which internal conditions alter worldly configurations and invert values, in Gibson’s sense of the term, albeit without implying subjectivism. My aim is to cut across the somatic focus of enactive constructivism and the external environment-oriented emphasis of ecological realism and show that enactivism can enrich ecological accounts of value.