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In-Depth Information
The enactive approach takes fi rst person experience and awareness of the cogni-
tive agent as the starting point. It advocates for an intelligent perception and action
system that pairs interesting actions and related percepts as a coupling that are
stored to guide future interactions. Enaction is rooted in the notion that cognitive
agents always experience reality as a continuous interaction with the world and any
investigation or model should have interaction as its fundamental constituent.
7.3.1
Enactive Perception
Perception is not a passive reception of sensory data but rather an active process of
visually reaching out into the environment to understand how objects can be manip-
ulated (Gibson
1979
; Noë
2004
). In the enactive view, cognition is seen as a process
of anticipation, assimilation, and adaptation, all of which are embedded in and con-
tributing to a continuous process of perception and action. This type of enactive
perception minimally involves a negotiation among the following factors: (1) the
subject's intentional state, (2) the skills and bodily capabilities of the individual, and
(3) perceptually available features of the environment that afford different actions
such as size, shape, and weight (e.g., is it graspable, liftable, draggable, etc., as
elaborated in Norman (
1999
)). Sensory data enters the cognitive system and irrele-
vant data is suppressed and fi ltered (Gaspar and McDonald
2014
). Objects and
details of the environment that relate to the subject's intentional goals appear to
conscious perception as affordances, which can grab, direct, and guide attention and
action (Norman
1999
). Each time the individual physically moves through or acts
upon the environment, that action changes the perceptually available features of the
environment, which can reveal new relationships and opportunities for interaction.
7.3.2
Participatory Sensemaking
The enactive view accentuates the participatory nature of meaning generation, often
called participatory sensemaking. Each interaction with the environment can (and
often does) reveal new goals, which leads to a circuitous, rather than a linear, cre-
ative process. Creative individuals engage in a dialogue with the materials in their
environment (and other agents) to defi ne and refi ne creative intentions (Schön
1992
).
In human daily interactions, for example, there is evidence that some form of
natural coordination takes place in the shape of movement anticipation and synchro-
nization. A good example of participatory sensemaking would be the familiar situ-
ation where you encounter someone coming from the opposite direction in a narrow
passageway (De Jaegher
2009
). While trying to negotiate a safe and quick passage,
both participants look toward their intended path (providing a social cue) while also
trying to assess the projected path of other agents. Interaction then, in the form of
