Review of Philosophy and Psychology
2025
Julian Kiverstein, Mark Miller, Erik Rietveld
The predictive processing theory refers to a family of theories that take the brain and body of an organism to implement a hierarchically organized predictive model of its environment that works in the service of prediction-error minimization. Several philosophers have wondered how belief-like states of prediction account for the conative role desire plays in motivating a person to act. A...
Adaptive Behavior
June 6, 2023
Ivar R. Kolvoort, Katrin Schulz, Erik Rietveld
1 citation
Causal cognition is a core aspect of how we deal with the world; however, existing psychological theories tend not to target intuitive causal engagement that is done in daily life. To fill this gap, we propose an Ecological-Enactive (E-E) affordance-based account of situated causal engagement, that is, causal judgments and perceptions. We develop this account to improve our understanding of...
March 1, 2023
Erik Rietveld
Perception is often understood as an individual's mirroring of the objects in the world 'out there' .The influential ecological psychologist James Gibson (1904Gibson ( -1979) ) wanted to avoid such a division between subject and object.He developed a new account of the perception of the environment that breaks with the idea of static mirroring and rather makes activity central.According to...
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Erik Rietveld, Damiaan Denys, Maarten Van Westen
104 citations
Abstract The topic of this Oxford handbook is “4E cognition”: cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended. However, one important “E” is missing: an E for ecological. We sketch an ecological-enactive approach to cognition that presents a framework for bringing together the embodied/enactive program with the ecological program originally developed by James Gibson, in which...
Adaptive Behavior
May 23, 2018
Julian Kiverstein, Erik Rietveld
150 citations
Enactive approaches to cognitive science aim to explain human cognitive processes across the board without making any appeal to internal, content-carrying representational states. A challenge to such a research programme in cognitive science that immediately arises is how to explain cognition in so-called 'representation-hungry' domains. Examples of representation-hungry domains include...
Synthese
February 12, 2018
Jelle P. Bruineberg, Anthony Chemero, Erik Rietveld
119 citations
In this paper, we address the question of how an agent can guide its behavior with respect to aspects of the sociomaterial environment that are not sensorily present. A simple example is how an animal can relate to a food source while only sensing a pheromone, or how an agent can relate to beer, while only the refrigerator is directly sensorily present. Certain cases in which something is...
Synthese
October 23, 2017
Julian Kiverstein, Mark Miller, Erik Rietveld
According to the free energy principle biological agents resist a tendency to disorder in their interactions with a dynamically changing environment by keeping themselves in sensory and physiological states that are expected given their embodiment and the niche they inhabit (Friston in Nat Rev Neurosci 11(2):127–138, 2010. doi:10.1038/nrn2787). Why would a biological agent that aims at...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2013
Sanneke De Haan, Erik Rietveld, Martin Stokhof et al.
218 citations
People suffering from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) do things they do not want to do, and/or they think things they do not want to think. In about 10% of OCD patients, none of the available treatment options is effective. A small group of these patients is currently being treated with deep brain stimulation (DBS). DBS involves the implantation of electrodes in the brain. These electrodes...
Advances in Consciousness Research
August 7, 2012
Erik Rietveld
There are important structural similarities in the way that animals and humans engage in unreflective activities, including unreflective social interactions in the case of higher animals. Firstly, it is a form of unreflective embodied intelligence that is ‘motivated’ by the situation. Secondly, both humans and non-human animals are responsive to ‘affordances’ (Gibson 1979); to possibilities for...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 2, 2009
Pim Klaassen, Erik Rietveld, Julien Topal
20 citations
In everyday life, situations in which we act adequately yet entirely without deliberation are ubiquitous. We use the term “situated normativity” for the normative aspect of embodied cognition in skillful action. Wittgenstein’s notion of “directed discontent” refers to a context-sensitive reaction of appreciation in skillful action. Extending this notion from the domain of expertise to that of...