33 papers in the library · 1,407 citations · publishing 1996-2026
Synthese August 4, 2026 Guido Baggio, Shaun Gallagher
Abstract This article develops the concept of minimal self-sentience to extend the phenomenological notion of minimal self-awareness to non-human animals. Drawing on the phenomenological account of minimal pre-reflective self-awareness (e.g., Zahavi), and on the view that such a minimal form of self-experience can be attributed to non-human animals (e.g., Strawson), we propose to deepen the...
Continental Philosophy Review May 25, 2026 Shaun Gallagher
Abstract The concept of sedimentation, developed in phenomenology, provides a bridge between recent discussions of habit in embodied-enactive theories of cognition and skilled performance and conceptions of how habit and routine function in social practices and institutional formation. Although the notion of habit is little discussed in mainstream neoclassical economics, various theorists of...
Front Psychol May 12, 2026 Salvatore G Chiarella, Matteo Laurenzi, Marianna D’Onofrio et al.
Folk attributions of consciousness to non-human systems often reveal what may be termed double bias. Within the standard distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness, non-human animals often receive low attributions of consciousness despite convergent behavioral and neurobiological evidence treated as relevant to subjective experience. By contrast, disembodied artificial intelligence...
The MIT Press eBooks December 16, 2025 Shaun Gallagher
In this chapter I argue that to understand consciousness in relation to social interaction, we need to consider not just brain mechanisms, but also the extensive and enactive pro cesses of bodily engagement in the social environment.In addition, I suggest that the starting point for such an analy sis should not be reflective self-consciousness (see glossary), as if that were simply equivalent...
Minds and Machines November 11, 2025 Sara Incao, Alessandra Sciutti, Shaun Gallagher 2 citations
Cognitive architectures are simplified models of complex neural and behavioral processes, designed to equip artificial agents with flexibility and adaptive behavior. To enhance context-awareness and autonomy in humanoid robots, it is essential to address the role of temporality. The temporal dimension extends far beyond its association with memory, encompassing the continuity of self and...
The journal of pain May 2, 2025 Peter Stilwell, Mael Gagnon-Mailhot, Anne Hudon et al. 8 citations
Suffering is a foundational yet understudied construct within the field of pain. There is general agreement that pain-related suffering involves disruption to one's sense of self. The selfhood literature characterizes two inter-related modes of self-experience. One mode entails in-the-moment experiences that shape one's stream of consciousness; another involves self-reflective thoughts about...
Frontiers in Psychology 2025 Matteo Laurenzi, Antonino Raffone, Shaun Gallagher et al. 4 citations
In the last decades, research on animal consciousness has advanced significantly, fueled by interdisciplinary contributions. However, a critical dimension of animal experience remains underexplored: the self. While traditionally linked to human studies, research focused on the self in animals has often been framed dichotomously, distinguishing low-level, bodily, and affective aspects from...
Mindfulness August 1, 2024 Aviva Berkovich-Ohana, Kirk Warren Brown, Shaun Gallagher et al. 22 citations
Abstract For many centuries, scholars and philosophers from wisdom traditions in different cultures have reported and discussed non-self states of consciousness. These states can be both short-term (state, transitory) and long-term (trait, lasting) conditions. However, in psychology, the importance of a healthy self is usually emphasized, and some theorists have dismissed the idea of “selfless”...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences May 1, 2024 Shaun Gallagher, Antonino Raffone, Salvatore M. Aglioti
Concepts of empathy, sympathy and compassion are often confused in a variety of literatures. This article proposes a pattern-theoretic approach to distinguishing compassion from empathy and sympathy. Drawing on psychology, Western philosophy, affective neuroscience, and contemplative science, we clarify the nature of compassion as a specific pattern of dynamically related factors that include...
Frontiers in Psychology 2024 Anya Daly, Rosa Ritunnano, Shaun Gallagher et al. 17 citations
Mental disorders are increasingly understood as involving complex alterations of self that emerge from dynamical interactions of constituent elements, including cognitive, bodily, affective, social, narrative, cultural and normative aspects and processes. An account of self that supports this view is the pattern theory of self (PTS). The PTS is a non-reductive account of the self, consistent...
Cambridge University Press eBooks October 31, 2023 Shaun Gallagher 171 citations
This Element discusses contemporary theories of embodied cognition, including what has been termed the '4Es' (embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition). It examines diverse approaches to questions about the nature of the mind, the mind's relation to the brain, perceptual experience, mental representation, sense making, the role of the environment, and social cognition, and it...
Connection Science September 15, 2023 Shaun Gallagher
I focus on the enactivist and extended mind approaches to embodied cognition (EC), and specifically on the concepts of body schema, affectivity, distributed cognition and intersubjectivity to show how EC has relevance to questions about expert performance, and to the theory and practice of performing arts.
Front Psychol May 18, 2023 Riccardo Viale, Shaun Gallagher, Vittorio Gallese 19 citations
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...
Mindfulness April 11, 2023 Shaun Gallagher, Antonino Raffone, Aviva Berkovich-Ohana et al. 49 citations
Abstract In this paper, we address core insights from Buddhist psychology about mind-body phenomena and the self, and we relate such insights to the notion of the self-pattern developed in the pattern theory of self. We emphasize the dynamic, temporal and enactive characteristics of the self-pattern, consistent with the core Buddhist notion of non-self. Although there is no one-to-one mapping...
International journal of clinical and health psychology : IJCHP 2023 Fabio Giommi, Prisca R. Bauer, Aviva Berkovich-Ohana et al. 70 citations
Clinical and neuroscientific evidence indicates that transdiagnostic processes contribute to the generation and maintenance of psychopathological symptoms and disorders. Rigidity (inflexibility) appears a core feature of most transdiagnostic pathological processes. Decreasing rigidity may prove important to restore and maintain mental health. One of the primary domains in which rigidity and...
Frontiers in Psychology 2023 Shaun Gallagher 13 citations
The concept of minimal self-consciousness or "minimal self" is equivalent to a very basic form of first-person, pre-reflective self-awareness, which includes bodily self-awareness, and is related to phenomenal experience (qualia) and sentience. This phenomenological concept plays a role in characterizations of the senses of ownership and agency; in recent debates about Buddhist conceptions of...
Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) February 13, 2021 Zuzanna Rucińska, Thomas Fondelli, Shaun Gallagher 11 citations
This paper discusses different frameworks for understanding imagination and metaphor in the context of research on the imaginative skills of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In contrast to a standard linguistic framework, it advances an embodied and enactive account of imagination and metaphor. The paper describes a case study from a systemic therapeutic session with a child with...
JoLMA December 9, 2020 Mia Burnett, Shaun Gallagher 17 citations
We review 4E (embodied, embedded, extended and enactive) approaches to the analysis of art and aesthetic experience. We argue that extended mind analyses that focus on tool use miss important aspects, and that it requires 4 or more E’s to address the broad spectrum of aesthetic experiences that correlate to the broad variety of artistic genres. We develop an enactive, affordance-based approach...
Frontiers in Psychology 2020 Kevin J Ryan, Shaun Gallagher 61 citations
Ecological psychologists and enactivists agree that the best explanation for a large share of cognition is non-representational in kind. In both ecological psychology and enactivist philosophy, then, the task is to offer an explanans that does not rely on representations. Different theorists within these camps have contrasting notions of what the best kind of non-representational explanation...
Frontiers in Psychology August 19, 2019 Shaun Gallagher, Antonio Mastrogiorgio, Enrico Petracca
An important part of what it means for agents to be situated in the everyday world of human affairs includes their engagement with economic practices. In this paper, we employ the concept of cognitive institutions in order to provide an enactive and interactive interpretation of market and economic reasoning. We challenge traditional views that understand markets in terms of market structures...
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition October 9, 2018 Albert Newen, Shaun Gallagher, Leon De Bruin 129 citations
Abstract The Introduction starts with offering definitions of the central 4E features, that is, the features of embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended cognition. To set the stage, we sketch the conceptual distinction that characterizes the role of these features: are they only causally influencing a mental phenomenon or are some of them constituting it? We suggest that we can no longer...
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition October 9, 2018 Shaun Gallagher 20 citations
Abstract After reviewing some disagreements and worries about embodied cognition (EC) as a research field, I focus on the distinction between weak EC, which focuses on brain-based, body-related representations, and strong EC, which takes the extraneural body and environment to be more central to cognition. An important aspect of weak EC is its reliance on the neural reuse hypothesis. I argue...
Frontiers in Psychology May 11, 2018 Shaun Gallagher, Anya Daly 105 citations
The notion of a self-pattern, as developed in the pattern theory of self (Gallagher, 2013), which holds that the self is best explained in terms of the kind of reality that pertains to a dynamical pattern, acknowledges the importance of neural dynamics, but also expands the account of self to extra-neural (embodied and enactive) dynamics. The pattern theory of self, however, has been criticized...
Synthese 2018 Shaun Gallagher, Micah Allen 221 citations
We distinguish between three philosophical views on the neuroscience of predictive models: predictive coding (associated with internal Bayesian models and prediction error minimization), predictive processing (associated with radical connectionism and 'simple' embodiment) and predictive engagement (associated with enactivist approaches to cognition). We examine the concept of active inference...
Frontiers in Psychology September 21, 2017 Shaun Gallagher 59 citations
I defend a phenomenological account of the sense of ownership as part of a minimal sense of self from those critics who propose either a deflationary or eliminativist critique. Specifically, I block the deflationary critique by showing that in fact the phenomenological account is itself a deflationary account insofar as it takes the sense of ownership to be implicit or intrinsic to experience...