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Traditional theories of motor learning emphasize the automaticity of skillful actions. However, recent research has emphasized the role of pre-reflective self-consciousness accompanying skillful action execution. In the present paper, we present the course-of-experience framework as a means of studying elite athletes' pre-reflective self-consciousness in the unfolding activity of performance optimization. We carried out a synthetic presentation of the ontological and epistemological foundation of this framework. Then we illustrated the methodology by an in-depth analysis of two elite windsurfers' courses of experience. The analysis of global and local characteristics of the riders' courses of experience reveal (a) the meaningful activities accompanying the experience of ongoing performance optimization; (b) the multidimensionality of attentional foci and the normativity of performance self-assessment; and (c) a micro-scale phenomenological description of continuous improvement. These results highlight the fruitfulness of the course-of-experience framework to describe the experience of being absorbed in an activity of performance optimization., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Terrien, Huet, Iachkine and Saury.)

Background: Empathy is foundational in our intersubjective interactions, connecting with others across bodily, emotional, and cognitive dimensions. Previous evidence suggests that observing individuals in painful situations elicits whole bodily responses, unveiling the interdependence of the body and empathy. Although the role of the body has been extensively described, the temporal structure of bodily responses and its association with the comprehension of subjective experiences remain unclear., Objective: Building upon the enactive approach, our study introduces and examines "bodyssence," a neologism formed from "body" and "essence." Our primary goal is to analyze the temporal dynamics, physiological, and phenomenological elements in synchrony with the experiences of sportspersons suffering physical accidents., Methods: Using the empirical 5E approach, a refinement of Varela's neurophenomenological program, we integrated both objective third-person measurements (postural sway, electrodermal response, and heart rate) and first-person descriptions (phenomenological data). Thirty-five participants watched videos of sportspersons experiencing physical accidents during extreme sports practice, as well as neutral videos, while standing on a force platform and wearing electrodermal and heart electrodes. Subsequently, micro-phenomenological interviews were conducted., Results: Bodyssence is composed of three distinct temporal dynamics. Forefeel marks the commencement phase, encapsulating the body's pre-reflective consciousness as participants anticipate impending physical accidents involving extreme sportspersons, manifested through minimal postural movement and high heart rate. Fullfeel, capturing the zenith of empathetic engagement, is defined by profound negative emotions, and significant bodily and kinesthetic sensations, with this stage notably featuring an increase in postural movement alongside a reduction in heart rate. In the Reliefeel phase, participants report a decrease in emotional intensity, feeling a sense of relief, as their postural control starts to reach a state of equilibrium, and heart rate remaining low. Throughout these phases, the level of electrodermal activity consistently remains high., Conclusion: This study through an enactive approach elucidates the temporal attunement of bodily experience to the pain experienced by others. The integration of both first and third-person perspectives through an empirical 5E approach reveals the intricate nature of bodyssence, offering an innovative approach to understanding the dynamic nature of empathy., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Troncoso, Blanco, Rivera-Rei and Martínez-Pernía.)

Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Competing Interests: The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

This article aims to show that there is an alternative way to explain human action with respect to the bottlenecks of the psychology of decision making. The empirical study of human behaviour from mid-20th century to date has mainly developed by looking at a normative model of decision making. In particular Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) decision making, which stems from the subjective expected utility theory of Savage (1954) that itself extended the analysis by Von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944). On this view, the cognitive psychology of decision making precisely reflects the conceptual structure of formal decision theory. This article shows that there is an alternative way to understand decision making by recovering Newell and Simon's account of problem solving, developed in the framework of bounded rationality, and inserting it into the more recent research program of embodied cognition. Herbert Simon emphasized the importance of problem solving and differentiated it from decision making, which he considered a phase downstream of the former. Moreover according to Simon the centre of gravity of the rationality of the action lies in the ability to adapt. And the centre of gravity of adaptation is not so much in the internal environment of the actor as in the pragmatic external environment. The behaviour adapts to external purposes and reveals those characteristics of the system that limit its adaptation. According to Simon (1981), in fact, environmental feedback is the most effective factor in modelling human actions in solving a problem. In addition, his notion of problem space signifies the possible situations to be searched in order to find that situation which corresponds to the solution. Using the language of embodied cognition, the notion of problem space is about the possible solutions that are enacted in relation to environmental affordances. The correspondence between action and the solution of a problem conceptually bypasses the analytic phase of the decision and limits the role of symbolic representation. In solving any problem, the search for the solution corresponds to acting in ways that involve recursive feedback processes leading up to the final action. From this point of view, the new term enactive problem solving summarizes this fusion between bounded and embodied cognition. That problem solving involves bounded cognition means that it is through the problem solver's enactive interaction with environmental affordances, and especially social affordances that it is possible to construct the processes required for arriving at a solution. Lastly the concept of enactive problem solving is also able to explain the mechanisms underlying the adaptive heuristics of rational ecology. Its adaptive function is effective both in practical and motor tasks as well as in abstract and symbolic ones., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Viale, Gallagher and Gallese.)

Psychedelics are psychoactive substances that receive renewed interest from science and society. Increasing empirical evidence shows that the effects of psychedelics are associated with alterations in biochemical processes, brain activity, and lived experience. Still, how these different levels relate remains subject to debate. The current literature presents two influential views on the relationship between the psychedelic molecule, neural events, and experience: The integration view and the pluralistic view. The main aim of this article is to contribute a promising complementary view by re-evaluating the psychedelic molecule-brain-experience relationship from an enactive perspective. We approach this aim via the following main research questions: (1) What is the causal relationship between the psychedelic drug and brain activity? (2) What is the causal relationship between brain activity and the psychedelic experience? In exploring the first research question, we apply the concept of autonomy to the psychedelic molecule-brain relationship. In exploring the second research question, we apply the concept of dynamic co-emergence to the psychedelic brain-experience relationship . Addressing these two research questions from an enactive position offers a perspective that emphasizes interdependence and circular causality on multiple levels. This enactive perspective not only supports the pluralistic view but enriches it through a principled account of how multi-layered processes come to interact. This renders the enactive view a promising contribution to questions around causality in the therapeutic effects of psychedelics with important implications for psychedelic therapy and psychedelic research., Competing Interests: MS declares that he co-founded Reconnect Labs, an academic spin-off at the University of Zurich, focused on the development of psychedelic medicines for mental health. DM declares that this research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The handling editor NL declares a past co-authorship with the author MS., (Copyright © 2023 Meling and Scheidegger.)

Introduction: Traditionally, empathy has been studied from two main perspectives: the theory-theory approach and the simulation theory approach. These theories claim that social emotions are fundamentally constituted by mind states in the brain. In contrast, classical phenomenology and recent research based on the enactive theories consider empathy as the basic process of contacting others' emotional experiences through direct bodily perception and sensation., Objective: This study aims to enrich the knowledge of the empathic experience of pain using an experimental phenomenological method., Materials and Methods: Implementing an experimental paradigm used in affective neuroscience, we exposed 28 healthy adults to a video of sportspersons suffering physical accidents while practicing extreme sports. Immediately after watching the video, each participant underwent a phenomenological interview to gather data on embodied, multi-layered dimensions (bodily sensations, emotions, and motivations) and temporal aspects of empathic experience. We also performed quantitative analyses of the phenomenological categories., Results: Experiential access to the other person's painful experience involves four main themes. Bodily resonance: participants felt a multiplicity of bodily, affective, and kinesthetic sensations in coordination with the sportsperson's bodily actions. Attentional focus: some participants centered their attention more on their own personal discomfort and sensations of rejection, while others on the pain and suffering experienced by the sportspersons. Kinesthetic motivation: some participants experienced the feeling in their bodies to avoid or escape from watching the video, while others experienced the need to help the sportspersons avoid suffering any injury while practicing extreme sports. The temporality of experience: participants witnessed temporal fluctuations in their experiences, bringing intensity changes in their bodily resonance, attentional focus, and kinesthetic motivation. Finally, two experiential structures were found: one structure is self-centered empathic experience, characterized by bodily resonance, attentional focus centered on the participant's own experience of seeing the sportsperson suffering, and self-protective kinesthetic motivation; the other structure is other-centered empathic experience, characterized by bodily resonance, attentional focus centered on the sportsperson, and prosocial kinesthetic motivation to help them., Discussion: We show how phenomenological data may contribute to comprehending empathy for pain in social neuroscience. In addition, we address the phenomenological aspect of the enactive approach to the three dimensions of an embodiment of human consciousness, especially the intersubjective dimension. Also, based on our results, we suggest an extension of the enactive theory of non-interactive social experience., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Martínez-Pernía, Cea, Troncoso, Blanco, Calderón Vergara, Baquedano, Araya-Veliz, Useros-Olmo, Huepe, Carrera, Mack Silva and Vergara.)

Introduction: Reliance on sole reductionism, whether explanatory, methodological or ontological, is difficult to support in clinical psychiatry. Rather, psychiatry is challenged by a plurality of approaches. There exist multiple legitimate ways of understanding human functionality and disorder, i.e., different systems of representation, different tools, different methodologies and objectives. Pluralistic frameworks have been presented through which the multiplicity of approaches in psychiatry can be understood. In parallel of these frameworks, an enactive approach for psychiatry has been proposed. In this paper, we consider the relationships between the different kinds of pluralistic frameworks and this enactive approach for psychiatry., Methods: We compare the enactive approach in psychiatry with wider analytical forms of pluralism., Results: On one side, the enactive framework anchored both in cognitive sciences, theory of dynamic systems, systems biology, and phenomenology, has recently been proposed as an answer to the challenge of an integrative psychiatry. On the other side, two forms of explanatory pluralisms can be described: a non-integrative pluralism and an integrative pluralism. The first is tolerant, it examines the coexistence of different potentially incompatible or untranslatable systems in the scientific or clinical landscape. The second is integrative and proposes to bring together the different levels of understanding and systems of representations. We propose that enactivism is inherently a form of integrative pluralism, but it is at the same time a component of the general framework of explanatory pluralism, composed of a set of so-called analytical approaches., Conclusions: A significant number of mental health professionals are already accepting the variety of clinical and scientific approaches. In this way, a rigorous understanding of the theoretical positioning of psychiatric actors seems necessary to promote quality clinical practice. The study of entanglements between an analytical pluralism and a synthetic-organizational enactivist pluralism could prove fruitful., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Gauld, Nielsen, Job, Bottemanne and Dumas.)

In this paper I attempt to contribute to the developing field of "political philosophy of mind." To render concrete the notion of "affective frame," a social situation which pre-selects for salience and valence of environmental factors relative to a subject's life, I conduct a case study of a deleterious socially instituted affective frame, which, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, produced individuated circumstances that came crashing down on "essential workers" who were forced into a double bind. We saw here an untenable and ultimately fatal situation that forced a choice between, on the one hand, increasing the risk of their failing to provide financial support for their family if they quit their job or reduced their hours, and on the other, increasing their risk of contracting the virus by continuing to work. The case study will thus be itself an affective frame that will bring to the fore for its readers a nexus of harmful social practices of contemporary American society. Form is reinforced by content here, as this particular affective frame brings forth a further emphasis on affect when we focus on workers simultaneously socialized into roles as breadwinners and as members of the caring professions. For those people, quitting work becomes even more difficult as they come to affirm their self-identity of being providers of affective labor for those in their care at work and of being the affective anchor of family life at home, the one who financially helps keep a roof over the heads of their loved ones as well as being the emotional backbone of the family. Hence the affective frame of "essential workers in Covid times" renders salient and affirmatively valenced their affectively laden self-image as caring helpers of those in need, at home and at work., Competing Interests: The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Protevi.)

Several studies have revealed the abusive behaviors directed against athletes in various sports contexts, but knowledge about the processes by which the athletes realize and accept or reject maltreatment is underdeveloped. Thus, it is difficult to establish a solid scientific basis for characterizing the mechanisms of maltreatment from the athletes' perspective regarding the forms of maltreatment they endure and the impact on their performance and wellbeing. The main goals of this paper are to show how the enactive approach (including theoretical assumptions and methodological standards) can meet these challenges, as it is well-suited to (a) describe the evolving interactions between athletes and the sports situations that lead to maltreatment (i.e., navigating in the gray area of coach-athlete relationships), (b) identify those alert landmarks that help us assess the level of risk of athlete maltreatment, and (c) provide concrete guidelines to prevent and deal with sports-related maltreatment. We illustrate our approach by a case study that examines the experience of a retired high-level boxer who faced several forms of maltreatment. Our results reveal a dynamic change in the interactions between the boxer and the maltreatment situations that led her through (a) Acceptance (i.e., future-oriented positive involvement), (b) Regulation attempt (i.e., negative feelings about weight loss, exhaustion and loneliness, questioning the compromise between performance and health, acceptance and loneliness), (c) Distancing (i.e., reopening to others) and (d) Rejection (i.e., rebellion and the decision to stand up to her coach and leave). Based on our results, we present concrete guidelines to prevent and address sports-related maltreatment, with four progressive alert landmarks that help situate the athlete in the gray area of coach-athlete relationships and suggest a "timeline" of maltreatment escalation with key warnings., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Marsollier and Hauw.)

This paper aims to show that genders are enacted, by providing an account of how an individual can be said to enact a gender and explaining how, consequently, genders can be fluid. On the enactive-ecological view we defend, individuals first and foremost perceive the world as fields of affordances, that is, structured sets of action possibilities. Fields of natural affordances offer action possibilities because of the natural properties of organisms and environments. Handles offer graspability to humans because of physical-structural properties of handles and the anatomical-physiological properties of humans. Although humans live in fields of bodily, action, and cultural affordances, our work focuses on cultural affordances, where action possibilities are offered to individuals because of the normative responses of individuals in that culture. Knocking on a door affords entrance because knocking provides cultured individuals on the other side of the door an affordance to which they themselves behave normatively. Usually, behaving normatively in response to cultural affordances brings about sequences of perception-action loops, which we will call "scripts": for instance, closed doors afford knocking, which affords the individual inside opening the door, which affords an interpersonal meeting, which (may) afford entrance. Although the notion of script has a strong cognitivist flavor, one of the aims of the paper to provide an ecological account of scripts, to show that what cognitivists viewed as representations (or representational structures) are in fact environmentally structured perception-action loops. On our account of gender, gendered cultures build and maintain gendered cultural affordance landscapes, that is, landscapes in which the action possibilities individuals face are normed according to a specific body type or situation; most often (assigned) biological sex. Individuals enact a given gender when they come to perceive the affordances reserved for one gender by their culture and respond in the culturally normative way, thus enacting gendered sequences of perception-action loops (i.e., gendered scripts). With the shifting landscapes of cultural affordances brought about by several recent social, technological, and epistemic developments in some cultures, the gendered landscapes of affordances offered to individuals in these cultures have become more varied and less rigid, thus increasing the variety and flexibility of scripts individuals can enact. This entails that individuals in such cultures have an increased possibility for gender fluidity, which may in part explain the increasing number of people currently identifying outside the binary., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Albarracin and Poirier.)

Within a variety of contemplative traditions, non-dual-oriented practices were developed to evoke an experiential shift into a mode of experiencing in which the cognitive structures of self-other and subject-object subside. These practices serve to de-reify the enactment of an observing witness which is usually experienced as separate from the objects of awareness. While several contemplative traditions, such as Zen, Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, and Advaita Vedanta emphasize the importance of such a non-dual insight for the cultivation of genuine wellbeing, only very few attempts in contemplative science have turned toward the study of non-dual-oriented practices. This article starts from a recently developed theoretical cognitive science framework that models the requirements of a temporary experiential shift into a mode of experiencing free from cognitive subject-object structure. This model inspired by the enactive approach contributes theoretically grounded hypotheses for the much-needed rigorous study of non-dual practices and non-dual experiences. To do so, three steps are taken: first, common elements of non-dual-oriented practices are outlined. Second, the main ideas of enactive cognitive science are presented including a principled theoretical model of what is required for a shift to a pure non-dual experience, that is, an experiential mode that is unbound by subject-object duality. Third, this synthesized theoretical model of the requirements for the recognition of the non-dual is then compared with a specific non-dual style of meditation practice, namely, Mahāmudrā practice from Tibetan Buddhism. This third step represents a heuristic for evaluating the external coherence of the presented model. With this, the aim is to point toward a principled enactive view of non-dual meditative practice. In drawing the implications of the presented model, this article ends with an outlook toward next steps for further developing a research agenda that may fully address the concrete elements of non-dual practices., Competing Interests: The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Meling.)

The enactive approach has become an influential paradigm in cognitive science. One of its most important claims is that cognition is sense-making: to cognize is to enact a world of meaning. Thus, a world is not pregiven but enacted through sense-making. Most importantly, sense-making is not a fixed process or thing. It does not have substantial existence. Instead, it is groundless : it springs from a dynamic of relations, without substantial ground. Thereby, as all cognition is groundless, this groundlessness is considered the central underlying principle of cognition. This article takes that key concept of the enactive approach and argues that it is not only a theoretical statement. Rather, groundlessness is directly accessible in lived experience . The two guiding questions of this article concern that lived experience of groundlessness: (1) What is it to know groundlessness? (2) How can one know groundlessness? Accordingly, it elaborates (1) how this knowing of groundlessness fits into the theoretical framework of the enactive approach. Also, it describes (2) how it can be directly experienced when certain requirements are met. In an additional reflexive analysis, the context-dependency and observer-relativity of those statements themselves is highlighted. Through those steps, this article exhibits the importance of knowing groundlessness for a cognitive science discourse: this underlying groundlessness is not only the "ground" of cognition, but it also can be investigated empirically through lived experience. However, it requires a methodology that is radically different from classical cognitive science. This article ends with envisioning a future praxis of cognitive science which enables researchers to investigate not only theoretically but empirically the "foundationless foundation" of cognition: groundlessness., Competing Interests: The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Meling.)

Due to their complexity and variability, placebo effects remain controversial. We suggest this is also due to a set of problematic assumptions (dualism, reductionism, individualism, passivity). We critically assess current explanations and empirical evidence and propose an alternative theoretical framework-the enactive approach to life and mind-based on recent developments in embodied cognitive science. We review core enactive concepts such as autonomy, agency, and sense-making. Following these ideas, we propose a move from binary distinctions (e.g., conscious vs. non-conscious) to the more workable categories of reflective and pre-reflective activity. We introduce an ontology of individuation, following the work of Gilbert Simondon, that allow us to see placebo interventions not as originating causal chains, but as modulators and triggers in the regulation of tensions between ongoing embodied and interpersonal processes. We describe these interrelated processes involving looping effects through three intertwined dimensions of embodiment: organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective. Finally, we defend the need to investigate therapeutic interactions in terms of participatory sense-making, going beyond the identification of individual social traits (e.g., empathy, trust) that contribute to placebo effects. We discuss resonances and differences between the enactive proposal, popular explanations such as expectations and conditioning, and other approaches based on meaning responses and phenomenological/ecological ideas., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Arandia and Di Paolo.)

Understanding compositional practices is a major goal of musicology and music theory. Compositional practices have been traditionally viewed as disembodied and idiosyncratic. This view makes it hard to integrate musical creativity into our understanding of the general cognitive processes underlying meaning construction. To overcome this unnecessary isolation of musical composition from cognitive science, in this conceptual analysis, we approach compositional processes with the analytic tools of blending theory, material anchoring, and enaction. Our case study is Iannis Xenakis' use of sieves for distributing rhythmic patterns in Psappha . Though disregarded in previous accounts, the timeline and the gearwheel provide crucial conceptual templates for anchoring Xenakis' idea of time for this score. This case study of conceptual integration templates for temporal representation seeks to gain insight into musical creativity, embodiment, and blending, especially into how virtual interactions with material structures facilitate the construction of complex meanings., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Besada, Barthel-Calvet and Pagán Cánovas.)

Pregnancy presents some interesting challenges for the philosophy of embodied cognition. Mother and fetus are generally considered to be passive during pregnancy, both individually and in their relation. In this paper, we use the enactive operational concepts of autonomy, agency, individuation, and participation to examine the relation between mother and fetus in utero . Based on biological, physiological, and phenomenological research, we explore the emergence of agentive capacities in embryo and fetus, as well as how maternal agency changes as pregnancy advances. We show that qualitatively different kinds of agency have their beginnings already in utero , and to what extent fetal and maternal movement modulate affectivity and individuation in pregnancy. We thus propose that mother and fetus are both agents who participate in pregnancy. Pregnancy then emerges as a relational developmental organization that anchors and holds its developing participants. We end the paper with reflections on ethical implications of this proposal, and suggestions for future research., (Copyright © 2020 Martínez Quintero and De Jaegher.)

Baggs and Chemero (2018) propose that certain tensions between enaction and ecological psychology arise due different interpretations about what is meant by the "environment." In the enactive approach the emphasis is on the umwelt, which describes the environment as the "meaningful, lived surroundings of a given individual." The ecological approach, on the other hand, emphasises what they refer to as the habitat "the environment as a set of resources for a typical, or ideal, member of a species." By making this distinction, these authors claim they are able to retain the best of both the ecological and the enactive approaches. Herein I propose an account of the individuation of habits that straddles this distinction, what I call a compatabilist account. This is done in two parts. The first part teases out a host of compatibilities that exist between the enactive account as developed by Di Paolo et al. (2017) and the skilled intentionality framework as developed by Bruineberg and Rietveld (2014) and Rietveld and Kiverstein (2014). In part two these compatibilities are brought together with the that these compatibilities can be brought together with the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon to develop the notion of enhabiting. Enhabiting describes a set of ongoing processes by which an umwelt emerges from and is reproduced within the relationship between an embodied subject and their habitat. Thus, enhabiting points toward a point of intersection between enaction and ecological psychology. To enhabit is bring forth (to enact), within (to inhabit)., (Copyright © 2020 James.)

Enactive and ecological approaches to cognitive science both claim a "mutuality" between agents and their environments - that they have a complementary nature and should be addressed as a single whole system. Despite this apparent agreement, each offers criticisms of the other on precisely this point - enactivists claiming that ecological psychologists over-emphasize the environment, while the complementary criticism, of agent-centered constructivism, is leveled by ecological psychologists at enactivists. In this paper I suggest that underlying the confusion between the two approaches is the complexity of agency, which comes in different forms, at different scales or levels of analysis. Cognitive science has not theorized the relationship between these different forms in a sufficiently disciplined manner, and a task therefore remains of finding a way to map the complex territory of agency., (Copyright © 2020 McGann.)

Changing conceptions of the relation between organisms and their environments make up a crucial chapter in the history of psychology. This may be approached by a comparative study of how schematic diagrams portray this relation. Diagrams drive the communication and the teaching of ideas, the sedimentation of epistemic norms and methods of analysis, and in some cases the articulation of novel concepts through pictographic variants. Through a sampling of schematic representations, I offer a concise comparison of how different authors, with different interests and motivations, have portrayed important aspects of the organism-environment relation. I compare example diagrams according to the features they underscore (or omit) and group them into classes that emphasize interaction, transaction, and constitution loops., (Copyright © 2020 Di Paolo.)

Understanding the role of self-generated movements in perceptual learning is central to action-based theories of perception. Pioneering work on sensory adaptation by Richard M. Held during the 1950s and 1960s can still shed light on this question. In a variety of rich experiments Held and his team demonstrated the need for self-generated movements in sensory adaptation and perceptual learning. This body of work received different critical interpretations, was then forgotten for some time, and saw a surge of revived interest within embodied cognitive science. Through a brief review of Held's work and reactions to it, we seek to contribute to discussions on the role of activity and passivity in perceptual learning. We classify different positions according to whether this role is considered to be contextual (facilitatory, but not necessary), enabling (causally necessary), or constitutive (an inextricable part of the learning process itself). We also offer a critique of the notions of activity and passivity and how they are operationalized in experimental studies. The active-passive distinction is not a binary but involves a series of dimensions and relative degrees that can make it difficult to interpret and replicate experimental results. We introduce three of these dimensions drawing on work on the sense of agency: action initiation, control, and monitoring. These refinements in terms of causal relations and dimensions of activity-passivity should help illuminate open questions concerning the role of activity in perception and perceptual learning and clarify the convergences and differences between enaction and ecological psychology., (Copyright © 2020 Bermejo, Hüg and Di Paolo.)

With the arrival of the cognitive paradigm during the latter half of the last century, the theoretical and scientific bases of neurorehabilitation have been linked to the knowledge developed in cognitive neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience. Although the knowledge generated by these disciplines has made relevant contributions to neurological therapy, their theoretical premises may create limitations in therapeutic processes. The present manuscript has two main objectives: first, to explicitly set forth the theoretical bases of cognitive neurorehabilitation and critically analyze the repercussions that these premises have produced in clinical practice; and second, to propose the enactive paradigm to reinterpret perspectives on people with brain damage and their therapy (assessment and treatment). This analysis will show that (1) neurorehabilitation as a therapy underutilizes body-originated resources that aid in recovery from neurological sequelae ( embrained therapy ); (2) the therapeutic process is based exclusively on subpersonal explanation models ( subpersonal therapy ); and (3), neurorehabilitation does not take subjectivity of each person in their own recovery processes into account ( anti-subjective therapy ). Subsequently, and in order to attenuate or resolve the conception of embrained, subpersonal and anti-subjective therapy, I argue in support of incorporating the enactive paradigm in rehabilitation of neurological damage. It is proposed here under a new term, "experiential neurorehabilitation." This proposal approaches neurological disease and its sequelae as alterations in dynamic interaction between the body structure and the environment in which the meaning of the experience is also altered. Therefore, when a person is not able to walk, remember the past, communicate a thought, or maintain efficient self-care, their impairments are not only a product of an alteration in a specific cerebral area or within information processing; rather, the sequelae of their condition stem from alterations in the whole living system and its dynamics with the environment. The objective of experiential neurorehabilitation is the recovery of the singular and concrete experience of the person, composed of physical and subjective life attributes., (Copyright © 2020 Martínez-Pernía.)

The reflexive character of enactive theory is spelled out, in an effort to make explicit that which is usually implicit in debate: that we are responsible for the distinctions we draw, and that ultimately, the world that we collectively characterize is a joint production. Enaction, as treated here, is not a positivist scientific field, but an epistemologically self-conscious way to ground our understanding of the value-saturated lives of embodied beings. This stance is seen as entirely congruent with the scientific field of ecological psychology, which is itself then cast as a specific example of the kind of science that can be done in an enactive mode., (Copyright © 2020 Cummins.)

We propose a view of identity beyond the individual in what we call interpersonal inter-identities (IIIs). Within this approach, IIIs comprise collections of entangled stabilities that emerge in recurrent social interaction and manifest for those who instantiate them as relatively invariant though ever-evolving patterns of being (or more accurately, becoming) together. Herein, we consider the processes responsible for the emergence of these IIIs from the perspective of an enactive cognitive science. Our proposal hinges primarily on the development of two related notions: enhabiting and coenhabiting. First, we introduce the notion of enhabiting, a set of processes at the individual level whereby structural interdependencies stabilize and thereafter undergird the habits, networks of habits, and personal identities through which we make sense of our experience. Articulating this position we lean on the notion of a tendency toward an optimal grip, though offering it a developmental framing, whereby iterative states of selective openness help realize relatively stable autonomous personal identities with their own norms of self-regulation. We then extend many of the notions found applicable here to an account of social coenhabiting, in particular, we introduce the notion of tending toward a co-optimal grip as central to the development of social habits, networks of habits, and ultimately IIIs. Such structures, we propose, also emerge as autonomous structures with their own norms of self-regulation. We wind down our account with some reflections on the implications of these structures outside of the interactions wherein they come into being and offer some thoughts about the complex animations of the individual embodied subjects that instantiate them., (Copyright © 2020 James and Loaiza.)

Many of the studies on motor learning have investigated the dynamics of learning behaviors and shown that the learning process is non-linear, self-organized, and situated. Aligned with this research trend, studies within the enactive paradigm focus on learners' lived experience to understand how it shapes their intentions, actions, and perceptions. Thus, a joint analysis of experiential and behavioral assessments might help to explain the dynamics of learning (e.g., the transition between stable states). The aim of this case study was to analyze the dynamics of a beginner climber's lived experience as his performance progressed (i.e., climbing fluency) during a learning protocol. The protocol comprised 10 climbing sessions over 5 weeks. During the sessions, the climber had to climb a "control route" (CR) (i.e., a route that never changed) and "variants" (i.e., novel routes, in which the spatial layout of the holds was modified). Phenomenological data were collected with self-confrontation interviews after each session. From the verbalizations, a thematic analysis of the climber's intentions, actions, and perceptions was performed to detect the general dimensions of his experience. The behavioral data (the climber's performance) were assessed using four indicators of climbing fluency: climbing time (CT), immobility ratio (IR), geometric index of entropy (GIE) of the hip trajectory, and the jerk. Our results highlighted the dynamics of the climber's lived experience and performances in the unchanged and novel environments. The dynamics on the CR were characterized by four crucial episodes and the dynamics on the variants, by four ways of experiencing novelty. Our results are discussed around three points: (i) the climber's definition of his enacted fluency in terms of intentions, actions, and perceptions; (ii) how the definition was identified through a dynamic phenomenological synthesis; and (iii) three effects that characterize the dynamics: challenge, metaphor, and a refinement in perceptions., (Copyright © 2020 Rochat, Hacques, Ganière, Seifert, Hauw, Iodice and Adé.)

While technology is increasingly used in the classroom, we observe at the same time that making teachers and students accept it is more difficult than expected. In this work, we focus on multisensory technologies and we argue that the intersection between current challenges in pedagogical practices and recent scientific evidence opens novel opportunities for these technologies to bring a significant benefit to the learning process. In our view, multisensory technologies are ideal for effectively supporting an embodied and enactive pedagogical approach exploiting the best-suited sensory modality to teach a concept at school. This represents a great opportunity for designing technologies, which are both grounded on robust scientific evidence and tailored to the actual needs of teachers and students. Based on our experience in technology-enhanced learning projects, we propose six golden rules we deem important for catching this opportunity and fully exploiting it.

This article focuses on a scientific approach to the study of cognition that Warren McCulloch introduced in the era of cybernetics as "experimental epistemology." In line with recent attempts to highlight its contribution to cognitive science and AI, our article intends to draw attention to its unexplored influence on contemporary embodied approaches to the investigation of mind and consciousness. To this end, we will survey a series of models of cognitive systems genealogically related to the McCulloch-Pitts networks-based modeling approach, i.e., von Foerster's model of the biological computer, the Maturana-Varela model of the autopoietic system, and Varela's model of emergent selves. Based on examination of the relevant aspects of these models, we will argue that they offered the McCulloch-Pitts "cybernetic of networks" a coherent methodological and theoretical line of development, complementary to the well-known computationalist one. As we will show, this alternative evolutionary line empowered the biological orientation of McCulloch's experimental epistemology, laying foundations for contemporary "radically embodied" approaches to mind and consciousness - in particular the Thompson-Varela approach. We will identify the heritage of this tradition of inquiry for future research in cognitive science and AI by proposing guidelines that synthetize how its methodological and theoretical insights suggest taking into account the role(s) played by the biological body in cognitive processes - consciousness included.

Using an enactive approach to trail runners' activity, this study sought to identify and characterize runners' phenomenological gestalts, which are forms of experience that synthesize the heterogeneous sensorimotor, cognitive and emotional information that emerges in race situations. By an in-depth examination of their meaningful experiences, we were able to highlight the different typologies of interactions between bodily processes (e.g., sensations and pains), behaviors (e.g., actions and strategies), and environment (e.g., meteorological conditions and route profile). Ten non-professional runners who ran an ultra-trail running race (330 km, 24,000 m of elevation gain) volunteered to participate in the study. Data were collected in two steps: (1) collection of past activity traces (i.e., race maps, field notes, and self-assessment scales) and (2) enactive interviews using the past activity traces in which the runners were invited to relive their experience and describe their activity. The enactive interviews were coded using the course-of-experience methodology to identify the phenomenological gestalts that emerged from activity and scaffolded the runners' courses of experience. The results revealed that runners typically enact three phenomenological gestalts: controlling global ease, enduring general fatigue and experiencing difficult situations, and feeling freedom in the running pace. These phenomenological gestalts were made up of specific behaviors, involvements, and meaningful situated elements that portrayed various ways of achieving an ultra-endurance performance in the race situation. They also highlighted how runners enact a meaningful world by acting in relation to the fluctuations in physical sensations and environmental conditions during an ultra-trail race. Practical applications for preparation, race management and sports psychology interventions are proposed to enrich the existing recommendations. In conclusion, this approach provides new research perspectives by offering a more holistic grasp of activity in trail running through an in-depth analysis of athletes' experience. In doing so, we may expect that runners can connect these typical gestalts to their own personal experiences and stories as trail runners in order to sustain a viable approach to their sport.

From an enactive approach to human activity, we suggest that the use of appearance-enhancing drugs is better explained by the sense-making related to body image rather than the cognitive evaluation of social norms about appearance and consequent psychopathology-oriented approach. After reviewing the main psychological disorders thought to link body image issues to the use of appearance-enhancing substances, we sketch a flexible, dynamic and embedded account of body image defined as the individual's propensity to act and experience in specific situations. We show how this enacted body image is a complex process of sense-making that people engage in when they are trying to adapt to specific situations. These adaptations of the enacted body image require effort, perseverance and time, and therefore any substance that accelerates this process appears to be an easy and attractive solution. In this enactive account of body image, we underline that the link between the enacted body image and substance use is also anchored in the history of the body's previous interactions with the world. This emerges during periods of upheaval and hardship, especially in a context where athletes experience weak participatory sense-making in a sport community. We conclude by suggesting prevention and intervention designs that would promote a safe instrumental use of the body in sports and psychological helping procedures for athletes experiencing difficulties with substances use and body image.

Social coordination and affordance perception always take part in concrete situations in real life. Nonetheless, the different fields of ecological psychology studying these phenomena do not seem to make this situated nature an object of study. To integrate both fields and extend the reach of the ecological approach, we introduce the Skilled Intentionality Framework that situates both social coordination and affordance perception within the human form of life and its rich landscape of affordances. We argue that in the human form of life the social and the material are intertwined and best understood as sociomateriality. Taking the form of life as our starting point foregrounds sociomateriality in each perspective we take on engaging with affordances. Using ethnographical examples we show how sociomateriality shows up from three different perspectives we take on affordances in a real-life situation. One perspective shows us a landscape of affordances that the sociomaterial environment offers. Zooming in on this landscape to the perspective of a local observer, we can focus on an individual coordinating with affordances offered by things and other people situated in this landscape. Finally, viewed from within this unfolding activity, we arrive at the person's lived perspective: a field of relevant affordances solicits activity. The Skilled Intentionality Framework offers a way of integrating social coordination and affordance theory by drawing attention to these complementary perspectives. We end by showing a real-life example from the practice of architecture that suggests how this situated view that foregrounds sociomateriality can extend the scope of ecological psychology to forms of so-called "higher" cognition.

One of the most important sequela in persons who suffer from acquired brain injury is a behavioral disorder. To date, the primary approaches for the rehabilitation of this sequela are Applied Behavior Analysis, Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, and Comprehensive-Holistic Rehabilitation Programs. Despite this theoretical plurality, none of these approaches focuses on rehabilitating behavioral disorders considering the relation between affordance and environmental adaptation. To introduce this therapeutic view to neurorehabilitation, we apply the theoretical tenets of the enactive paradigm to the rehabilitation of a woman with severe behavioral and cognitive impairment. Over seventeen sessions, her behavioral and cognitive performance was assessed in relation to two seated affordances (seated on a chair and seated on a ball 65 cm in diameter) and the environmental adaptation while she was working on various cognitive tasks. These two seated affordances allowed to incorporate the theoretical assumptions of the enactive approach and to know how the behavior and the cognition were modified based on these two postural settings and the environmental adaptation. The findings indicate that the subject exhibited better behavioral (physical and verbal) and cognitive (matching success and complex task) performances when the woman worked on the therapeutic ball than when the woman was on the chair. The enactive paradigm applied in neurorehabilitation introduces a level of treatment that precedes behavior and cognition. This theoretical consideration allowed the discovery of a better relation between a seated affordance and the environmental adaptation for the improvement behavioral and cognitive performance in our case study.

The purpose of this study was to understand how a single pair of expert individual rowers experienced their crew functioning in natural conditions when asked to practice a joint movement for the first time. To fulfill this objective, we conducted a field study of interpersonal coordination that combined phenomenological and mechanical data from a coxless pair activity, to analyze the dynamics of the (inter)subjective experience compared with the dynamics of the team coordination. Using an enactivist approach to social couplings, these heterogeneous data were combined to explore the salience (and accuracy) of individuals' shared experiences of their joint action. First, we determined how each rower experienced the continuous crew functioning states (e.g., feelings of the boat's glide). Second, the phenomenological data helped us to build several categories of oar strokes (i.e., cycles), experienced by the rowers as either detrimentally or effectively performed strokes. Third, the mechanical signatures that correlated with each phenomenological category were tracked at various level of organization (i.e., individual-, interpersonal-, and boat-levels). The results indicated that (a) the two rowers did not pay attention to their joint action during most of the cycles, (b) some cycles were simultaneously lived as a salient, meaningful experience of either a detrimental (n = 15 cycles) or an effective (n = 18 cycles) joint action, and (c) the mechanical signatures diverged across the delineated phenomenological categories, suggesting that the way in which the cycles were experienced emerged from the variance in some mechanical parameters (i.e., differences in peak force level and mean force). Notably, the mechanical measures that helped to explain differences within the phenomenological categories were found at the interpersonal level of analysis, thus suggesting an intentional inter-personal mode of regulation of their joint action. This result is further challenged and discussed in light of extra-personal regulation processes that might concurrently explain why participants did not make an extensive salient experience of their joint action. We conclude that attempts to combine phenomenological and mechanical data should be pursued to continue the research on how individuals regulate the effectiveness of their joint actions' dynamics.

Converging evidence highlights the relevance of embodied cognition in learning processes. In this study we evaluate whether embodied action (enaction) improves cognitive understanding in children. Using the Piagetian conservation tasks in 6-7 year olds, we analyzed quantity conservation conceptualization in children who were active participants in the transformation process and compared these results to those of children who were mere observers of an adult's demonstration (as traditionally conducted). The investigation was performed with 105 first-graders. Conservation tasks were demonstrated to half the children, while the other half actively carried out the transformation of matter. Our findings showed that active manipulation of the material helped children recognize quantity invariance in a higher proportion than when the demonstration was only observed. That is, their enactive experience enabled them to comprehend conservation phenomena more easily than if they were merely passive observers. The outcome of this research thus emphasizes how active participation benefits cognitive processes in learning contexts, promoting autonomy, and agency during childhood.

The enactive approach to cognition is developed in the context of music and music education. I discuss how this embodied point of view affords a relational and bio-cultural perspective on music that decentres the Western focus on language, symbol and representation as the fundamental arbiters of meaning. I then explore how this 'life-based' approach to cognition and meaning-making offers a welcome alternative to standard Western academic approaches to music education. More specifically, I consider how the enactive perspective may aid in developing deeper ecological understandings of the transformative, extended and interpenetrative nature of the embodied musical mind; and thus help (re)connect students and teachers to the lived experience of their own learning and teaching. Following this, I examine related concepts associated with Buddhist psychology in order to develop possibilities for a contemplative music pedagogy. To conclude, I consider how an enactive-contemplative perspective may help students and teachers awaken to the possibilities of music education as 'ontological education.' That is, through a deeper understanding of 'music as a manifestation of life' rediscover their primordial nature as autopoietic and world-making creatures and thus engage more deeply with musicality as a means of forming richer and more compassionate relationships with their peers, their communities and the 'natural' and cultural worlds they inhabit.

Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily coordination in conversational contexts, I review the operational meaning of coordination in recent empirical research and related theorizing of embodied intersubjectivity. This discussion articulates what must be involved in treating linguistic meaning as dynamic processes of coordination. The coordination approach presents languaging as a set of dynamic self-organizing processes and actions on multiple timescales and across multiple modalities that come about and work in certain domains (those jointly constructed in social, interactive, high-order sense-making). These processes go beyond meaning at the level that is available to first-person experience. I take one crucial consequence of this to be the ubiquitously moral nature of languaging with others. Languaging coordinates experience, among other levels of behavior and event. Ethical effort is called for by the automatic autonomy-influencing forces of languaging as coordination.

This paper addresses the issue of "being together," and more specifically the issue of "being together in time." We provide with an integrative framework that is inspired by phenomenology, the enactive approach and dynamical systems theories. To do so, we first define embodiment as a living and lived phenomenon that emerges from agent-world coupling. We then show that embodiment is essentially dynamical and therefore we describe experiential, behavioral and brain dynamics. Both lived temporality and the temporality of the living appear to be complex, multiscale phenomena. Next we discuss embodied dynamics in the context of interpersonal interactions, and briefly review the empirical literature on between-persons temporal coordination. Overall, we propose that being together in time emerges from the relational dynamics of embodied interactions and their flexible co-regulation.

This article proposes a theoretical reflection on the conditions for the constitution of a distinction between the self and the world by a cognitive system. The main hypothesis is the following: proprioception, as a sensory system that is habitually dedicated essentially to experience of the body, is conceived here as a coupling which is necessary for the dual and concomitant constitution of a bodily self and of a distal perceptual field. After recalling the singular characteristics of proprioceptive coupling, three lines of thought are developed. The first, which is notably inspired by research on sensory substitution, aims at emphasizing the indispensable role of action in the context of such perceptual learning. In a second part, this hypothesis is tested against opposing arguments. In particular, we shall discuss, in the context of what Braitenberg called a synthetic psychology, the emergence of oriented behaviors in simple robots that can be regulated by sensory regulations which are strictly external, since these robots do not have any form of "proprioception." In the same vein, this part also provides the opportunity to discuss the argument concerning a bijective relation between action and proprioception; it has been argued by others that because of this strict bijection it is not possible for proprioception to be the basis for the constitution of an exteriority. The third part, which is more prospective, suggests that it is important to take the measure of the phylogenetic history of this exteriority, starting from unicellular organisms. Taking into account the literature which attests the existence of proprioception even amongst the most elementary living organisms, this leads us to propose that the coupling of proprioception to action is very primitive, and that the role we propose for it in the co-constitution of an exteriority and self is probably already at work in the simplest living organisms.

Neurophenomenology, as an attempt to combine and mutually enlighten neural and experiential descriptions of cognitive processes, has met practical difficulties which have limited its implementation into actual research projects. The main difficulty seems to be the disparity of the levels of description: while neurophenomenology strongly emphasizes the micro-dynamics of experience, at the level of brief mental events with very specific content, most neural measures have much coarser functional selectivity, because they mix functionally heterogeneous neural processes either in space or in time. We propose a new starting point for this neurophenomenology, based on (a) the recent development of human intra-cerebral EEG (iEEG) research to highlight the neural micro-dynamics of human cognition, with millimetric and millisecond precision and (b) a disciplined access to the experiential micro-dynamics, through specific elicitation techniques. This lays the foundation for a microcognitive science, the practical implementation of neurophenomenology to combine the neural and experiential investigations of human cognition at the subsecond level.