IEEE Transactions on Haptics
October 27, 2011
Tom Froese, Marek Mcgann, William Bigge et al.
94 citations
The enactive approach to cognition emphasizes that meaningful perceptual experience arises from goal-directed bodily activity. Building on insights about practical tool-use, this work defines an 'enactive interface' as one that augments sense-making. The authors introduce the Enactive Torch, a custom-built device, and present a study of its experiential effects. Results show that the user experience is not captured by any standard perceptual modality; instead, it is a new feeling mediated by the device's design and shaped by the task situation. The findings suggest that engineering and cognitive science should collaborate to create experience-centered technology that serves as a transparent medium for augmenting natural interaction skills.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2018
Marcin Miłkowski, Robert Clowes, Zuzanna Rucińska et al.
82 citations
Several recent 'wide' perspectives on cognition—embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed—are only partially relevant because cognitive science has already moved beyond them toward integrated mechanistic explanations that include internal submechanisms, interactions with others, groups, cognitive artifacts, and the environment. These wide perspectives function as research heuristics for building such explanations. The argument draws on developments in the study of mindreading and debates on emotions, showing that cognitive neuroscience has undergone a silent mechanistic revolution, turning from binary oppositions toward integration with the broader field.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2014
Marek Mcgann
49 citations
Embodied cognitive science often describes the mind as “world-involving,” yet the nature of the environment remains poorly specified. This paper argues that enactivists should ally with a dynamic form of ecological psychology, which offers the most explicit theory of the psychological environment. It explores the intersubjective, cultural character of human psychology and the challenges this poses for both enactivist and ecological approaches. The theory of behavior settings (Barker, 1968; Schoggen, 1989) is presented as a framework to address these challenges, yielding an outline of a radical embodied account of intersubjectivity and social activity.