Enactive Mind Research Articles

Implications of the embodied, enactive mind on theorizing about information experience

ABSTRACTInformation Experience is a recent and growing concept in Information Science that is proposed as a holistic approach to explicitly examine the human experience of information interactions, including an individual's perceptual, cognitive and embodied experience. Valuable to this discussion is setting out a suitable philosophical position about the conception of the mind. This paper proposes that the concepts of embodied cognition and the non‐representational, enactive mind are necessary conceptions of mind for an adequate theoretical account of Information Experience. Furthering this discussion, the concept of information as an enactive cognitive phenomenon is explored, as constructed by the individual, embodied by their experience and contextually situated. These conceptions will provide a foundation for further development of the emerging field of information experience, and prove thought provoking for the Information Science field generally in the development of new approaches to the ways we use and share information in our communities and the future technologies we build for this.

Screendance as enactment in Maya Deren’s At Land

The dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Maya Deren can be seen as one of the pioneers of screendance. Her experimental films have challenged conventional plot- driven mainstream cinema by emphasizing an ambiguous experience, open for multiple interpretations. For Deren film viewing is a socially determined ritual embodying intersubjectively shared experiences of participants. This makes her films particularly interesting for today’s neurocinematic studies. Deren’s ideas also anticipate the recent enactive mind approach, according to which the body-brain system is in an inseparable manner situated and coupled with the world through interaction. It assumes that both private, such as perception and cognition, and intersubjective aspects of human enactment, such as culture, sciences, or the arts, are based on the embodiment of life experience. Reflecting this discourse, Deren’s film At Land is analyzed as an expression of a human body-brain system situated and enactive within the world, with references to neuroscience, neurocinematic studies, and screendance.

Concepts and how they get that way

Drawing on the material culture of the Ancient Near East as interpreted through Material Engagement Theory, the journey of how material number becomes a conceptual number is traced to address questions of how a particular material form might generate a concept and how concepts might ultimately encompass multiple material forms so that they include but are irreducible to all of them together. Material forms incorporated into the cognitive system affect the content and structure of concepts through their agency and affordances, the capabilities and constraints they provide as the material component of the extended, enactive mind. Material forms give concepts the tangibility that enables them to be literally grasped and manipulated. As they are distributed over multiple material forms, concepts effectively become independent of any of them, yielding the abstract irreducibility that makes a concept like number what it is. Finally, social aspects of material use—collaboration, ordinariness, and time—have important effects on the generation and distribution of concepts.

Review of the Cognitive-emotional brain: From interactions to integration and The feeling body: Affective neuroscience meets the enactive mind.

Review of the Cognitive-emotional brain: From interactions to integration and The feeling body: Affective neuroscience meets the enactive mind.

Review of "The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind" and "Feeling Extended: Sociality as Extended Body-Becoming-Mind"

Review of "The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind" and "Feeling Extended: Sociality as Extended Body-Becoming-Mind"

Beyond neurophenomenology: A review of Colombetti's The Feeling Body

I review The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind by Giovanna Colombetti (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2014, 288 pages, $40.00 hardcover). In this book Colombetti draws on the enactive theory of organismic embodiment and its key concept of sense-making in order to critically evaluate various aspects of mainstream affective science, including basic emotions and alternative constructionist approaches, as well as the cognitivist approach to emotion and appraisal theory. She defends and develops a dynamical systems approach to emotions and emphasizes the need for including more first-person methods of consciousness science in mainstream affective neuroscience. These are valuable contributions to affective science, and they also advance enactive theory. Colombetti's proposal goes further than standard neurophenomenology in that she appeals to the bodily basis of feeling, thereby requiring a new sort of neuro-physio-phenomenology. Even more radically, she allows that all living beings are essentially affective beings, even those without a nervous system, and that emotional forms could be co-constituted by more than one person.

Thinking-is-moving: dance, agency, and a radically enactive mind

Recently, in cognitive science, the enactivist account of cognition has been gaining ground, due in part to studies of movement in conjunction with thought. The idea, as Noe (2009), has put it, that “cognition is not something happening inside us or to us, but it’s something we do, something we achieve,” is increasingly supported by research on joint attention, movement coordination, and gesture. Not surprisingly, therefore, enactivists have also begun to look at “movement specialists”—dancers—for both scientific and phenomenological accounts of thinking with and through movement. In this paper, I argue that a serious exploration of dance and movement does not merely bolster the enactivist view, but rather, it suggests a radical enactivism, as envisaged by, e.g., Hutto (2011). To support this claim, I examine an account of “Thinking in Movement” provided by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (1981, 2009) in order to highlight the ways in which intentional agency and meaning-making occur in improvisational dance. These processes, I further argue, closely mirror some of the key components of participatory sense making, as described by De Jaegher and Di Paolo (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6(4):485–507, 2007). This is beneficial to my case, because it permits a discussion of “thought-full action” that does not depend upon standard cognitivist frameworks for explanation. By carefully focusing on how agency can help to separate mere “thrashing about” from meaningful movement, this paper aim to strengthen the position of radical enactivism from the unique perspective and dance and sense-making.

The enactive mind : an epistemological framework for radically embodied didactics.

The main aim of this article is to promote, at an epistemological level, the development of radically embodied didactics, that is, didactics which conceives the agents involved in the learning process – scholars and students in primis – as radically interdependent brain-body-environment(s) units involved in a constructive and creative cognitive process. Th is article proposes the radically embodied view of the mind introduced by Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela to the theoretical debate in didactics. Through the reconstruction of the basic structure of this theory, and its contextualization within the radically constructivist epistemology, this article brings attention to some of the most specific and interesting aspects of this theory: (a) the overcoming of merely anatomical conceptions of embodiment, as well as merely spatial operations of cognitive extension; (b) the convergences with the insights produced by neurophysiological research on mirroring mechanisms; (c) the proposal of a “legitimate questions maieutic practice”, grounded in the radically constructivist thesis according to which cognition is a participative process of construction of a shared world.

Autism: mind and brain

Introduction 1. Understanding autism: insights from mind and brain 2. A retrospective analysis of the clinical case records of 'autistic psychopaths' diagnosed by Hans Asperger and his team at the University Children's Hospital, Vienna 3. Identifying neurocognitive phenotypes in autism 4. Why is joint attention a pivotal skill in autism? 5. Does the perception of moving eyes trigger reflexive visual orienting in autism? 6. The pathogenesis of autism: insights from congenital blindness 7. The enactive mind, or from actions to cognition: lessons from autism 8. The systemizing quotient: an investigation of adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism and normal sex differences 9. Towards an understanding of the mechanisms of weak central coherence effects: experiments in visual configural learning and auditory perception 10. Disentangling weak coherence and executive dysfunction: planning drawing in autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder 11. Autism and movement disturbance 12. Investigating individual differences in brain abnormalities in autism 13. The role of the fusiform face area in social cognition: implications for the pathobiology of autism

The enactive mind, or from actions to cognition: lessons from autism.

Normative-IQ individuals with autism are capable of solving explicit social cognitive problems at a level that is not matched by their ability to meet the demands of everyday social situations. The magnitude of this discrepancy is now being documented through newer techniques such as eye tracking, which allows us to see and measure how individuals with autism search for meaning when presented with naturalistic social scenes. This paper offers an approach to social cognitive development intended to address the above discrepancy, which is considered a key element for any understanding of the pathophysiology of autism. This approach, called the enactive mind (EM), originates from the emerging work on 'embodied cognitive science', a neuroscience framework that views cognition as bodily experiences accrued as a result of an organism's adaptive actions upon salient aspects of the surrounding environment. The EM approach offers a developmental hypothesis of autism in which the process of acquisition of embodied social cognition is derailed early on, as a result of reduced salience of social stimuli and concomitant enactment of socially irrelevant aspects of the environment.