Ezequiel Di Paolo

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at Ikerbasque - Basque Foundation for Science

The enactive approach provides a perspective on human bodies in their organic, sensorimotor, social, and linguistic dimensions, but many fundamental issues still remain unaddressed. A crucial desideratum for a theory of human bodies is that it be able to account for concrete human becoming. In this article I show that enactive theory possesses reso...

I discuss some central ideas of the enactive approach in cognitive science, including the concepts of autonomy, sense-making, and agency, and show the way they are grounded in dynamical systems theory, organizational approaches to biology, and phenomenology. I highlight known and potentially new connections between enactive cognitive science and dy...

Several authors have made claims about the compatibility between the Free Energy Principle (FEP) and theories of autopoiesis and enaction. Many see these theories as natural partners or as making similar statements about the nature of biological and cognitive systems. We critically examine these claims and identify a series of misreadings and misin...

We examine the question of material agency as raised in material engagement theory (MET). Insofar as MET tends to highlight the causal roles played by extra-bodily material flows in human practices, the term “material agency” does not sufficiently distinguish cases in which these flows are part of an agentive engagement from cases in which they are...

There is a growing interest in Evald Ilyenkov’s work and its significance for contemporary debates. This interest spans several disciplines. One key thread in Ilyenkov’s ideas concerns a perspective on the relation between biology and psychology. In rejecting crude reductionism and individualism, Ilyenkov put forward a view of mind and personhood a...

Hay una pequeña, pero creciente, comunidad de investigadores que abarca un espectro de disciplinas unidas en su rechazo al aún dominante paradigma computacionalista en favor del enfoque enactivo. El marco teórico de este enfoque se centra en un conjunto de ideas, como la de autonomía, creación de sentido, emergencia, corporeización y experiencia. E...

Comprender el papel de los movimientos autogenerados en el aprendizaje perceptivo es fundamental para las teorías de la percepción basadas en la acción, como es la enactiva. Durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX diversos estudios comportamentales hicieron foco en el rol de la autogeneración de movimientos como condición necesaria para el aprendizaj...

This fully revised and updated 2nd edition provides a comprehensive reference guide to existentialism, featuring key chapters on key existentialist thinkers, as well as chapters applying existentialism to subject areas ranging across politics, literature, feminism, religion, the emotions, cognitive science, and poststructuralism. Contemporary devel...

Enaction is an increasingly influential approach to cognition that grew out of Maturana and Varela's earlier work on autopoiesis and the biology of cognition. As with any relatively new scientific discipline, the enactive approach would benefit greatly from a careful analysis of its theoretical foundations. Here we initiate such an analysis for one...

Despite the recognized importance of bodily movements in spatial audition, few studies have integrated action-based protocols with spatial hearing in the peripersonal space. Recent work shows that tactile feedback and active exploration allow participants to improve performance in auditory distance perception tasks. However, the role of the differe...

Enactive cognitive science combines questions in epistemology, ontology, and ethics by conceiving of bodies as open-ended and mutually transforming through activity. While enaction is not a theory of ethics, it can contribute to its foundations. We present a schematization of enactive ideas that underlie traditional distinctions between Being, Know...

Several authors have made claims about the compatibility between the Free Energy Principle (FEP) and theories of autopoiesis and enaction. Many see these theories as natural partners or as making similar statements about the nature of biological and cognitive systems. We critically examine these claims and identify a series of misreadings and misin...

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many therapists and patients have been required to switch to online sessions in order to continue their treatments. Online psychotherapy has become increasingly popular, and although its efficacy seems to be similar to face-to-face encounters, its capacity to support the implicit nonverbal and embodied aspects...

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—bas...

Prompted by our commentators, we take this response as an opportunity to clarify the premises, attitudes, and methods of our enactive approach to human languaging. We high-light the need to recognize that any investigation, particularly one into language, is always a concretely situated and self-grounding activity; our attitude as researchers is on...

Inspired by models of self-organized criticality, a family of measures quantifies long-range correlations in neural and behavioral activity in the form of self-similar (e.g., power-law scaled) patterns across a range of scales. Long-range correlations are often taken as evidence that a system is near a critical transition, suggesting interaction-do...

I briefly reflect on the work of John Stewart and his instrumental role in the development of enactive cognitive science, his outstanding ability to communicate across disciplines, and his research obsessions.

Mascolo (2020) successfully defends a relational, developmental approach to emotions. I draw parallels between his perspective and the enactive approach, in particular with the concept of participatory sense-making. I suggest that the need to understand emotions developmentally reveals a deeper link between affective life and human unfinishedness,...

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,...

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...

Adaptation to systematic visual distortions is well-documented but there is little evidence of similar adaptation to radical changes in audition. We use a pseudophone to transpose the sound streams arriving at the left and right ears, evaluating the perceptual effects it provokes and the possibility of learning to locate sounds in the reversed cond...

Open peer commentary on the article “Meeting You for the First Time: Descriptive Categories of an Intersubjective Experience” by Magali Ollagnier-Beldame & Christophe Coupé. Abstract: Microphenomenological methods provide important sources of experiential data for the investigation of intersubjectivity. We discuss complementarities with the PRISMA...

I discuss the notion of bodies proposed by Villalobos and Razeto-Barry. I consider it a good move in a direction away from overly formal aspects of autopoietic theory, but in need of refinement. I suggest that because organismic boundaries are dialectical processes and not immanent walls, some autopoietic bodies can extend by incorporating parts of...

The capacity to integrate information is a prominent feature of biological, neural, and cognitive processes. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) provides mathematical tools for quantifying the level of integration in a system, but its computational cost generally precludes applications beyond relatively small models. In consequence, it is not yet w...

A novel theoretical framework for an embodied, non-representational approach to language that extends and deepens enactive theory, bridging the gap between sensorimotor skills and language. Linguistic Bodies offers a fully embodied and fully social treatment of human language without positing mental representations. The authors present the first co...

The ability to integrate information into a unified coherent whole is a fundamental capacity of many biological and cognitive systems. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) provides a mathematical approach to quantify the level of integration in a system. Nevertheless, it is not yet well understood how integration scales up with the size of a system...

The concept of autonomy is fundamental for understanding biological organization and the evolutionary transitions of living systems. Understanding how a system constitutes itself as an individual, cohesive entity is a fundamental challenge for the understanding of life. However, it is generally a difficult task to determine whether the system or it...

This chapter provides an overview of the enactive approach in cognitive science.

How accurate is the picture of the human mind that has emerged from studies in neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science? Anybody with an interest in how minds work - how we learn about the world and how we remember people and events - may feel dissatisfied with the answers contemporary science has to offer. Sensorimotor Life draws on current...

The sensorimotor approach to perception addresses various aspects of perceptual experience, but not the subjectivity of intentional action. Conversely, the problem that current accounts of the sense of agency deal with is primarily one of subjectivity. But the proposed models, based on internal signal comparisons, arguably fail to make the transiti...

This book elaborates a series of contributions to a non-representational theory of action and perception. It is based on current theoretical developments in the enactive approach to life and mind. These enactive ideas are applied and extended to provide a theoretically rich, naturalistic account of sensorimotor meaning and agency. This account supp...

Research into perceptual and behavioural adaptations to radical disruptions of the agent-environment coupling has long been an interest of dynamical and embodied agent-based modeling. While existing artificial life models draw inspiration from Kohler’s experiments on visual disruptions, their sensorimotor instantiation is rather minimal, typically...

Social factors have so far been neglected in embodied theories of perception despite the wealth of phenomenological insights and empirical evidence indicating their importance. I examine evidence from developmental psychology and neuroscience and attempt an initial classification according to whether social factors play a contextual, enabling, or c...

A recent framework inspired by phenomenological philosophy, dynamical systems theory, embodied cognition and robotics has proposed the interactive brain hypothesis (IBH). Whereas mainstream social neuroscience views social cognition as arising solely from events in the brain, the IBH argues that social cognition requires, in addition, causal relati...

We summarize some of the main proposals of the enactive approach to social understanding and discuss some common misreadings of the notion of participatory sense-making. The emphasis on the role played by social interaction in the enactive perspective is sometimes misinterpreted as the adoption of an interactionist stance, whereby individual proces...

Research on social cognition needs to overcome a disciplinary disintegration. On the one hand, in cognitive science and philosophy of mind - even in recent embodied approaches - the explanatory weight is still overly on individual capacities. In social science on the other hand, the investigation of the interaction process and interactional behavio...

Inspirations from nature have fundamentally contributed to the development of evolutionary computation (EC). This paper, by learning from the natural ripple-spreading phenomenon, proposes a novel ripple-spreading algorithm (RSA) for the path optimization problem (POP). In nature, a ripple spreads at a constant speed in all directions, and the node...

The sensorimotor approach proposes that perception is constituted by the mastery of lawful sensorimotor regularities or sensorimotor contingencies (SMCs), which depend on specific bodily characteristics and on actions possibilities that the environment enables and constrains. Sensory substitution devices (SSDs) provide the user information about th...

The sensorimotor approach proposes that perception is constituted by the mastery of lawful sensorimotor regularities or sensorimotor contingencies (SMCs), which depend on specific bodily characteristics and on actions possibilities that the environment enables and constrains. Sensory substitution devices (SSDs) provide the user information about th...

The temporality of intentions and actions in situations of social interaction can sometimes be paradoxical. I argue that in these situations it may sometimes be possible to conceive of individual acts that can, in a strong sense, be intended retroactively. This could happen when the relational patterns in social interaction literally alter the virt...

The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of...

The dynamic interaction of limb segments during movements that involve multiple joints creates torques in one joint due to motion about another. Evidence shows that such interaction torques are taken into account during the planning or control of movement in humans. Two alternative hypotheses could explain the compensation of these dynamic torques....

Learning to perceive is faced with a classical paradox: if understanding is required for perception, how can we learn to perceive something new, something we do not yet understand? According to the sensorimotor approach, perception involves mastery of regular sensorimotor co-variations that depend on the agent and the environment, also known as the...

The sensorimotor approach argues that in order to perceive one needs to first “master” the relevant sensorimotor contingencies, and then exercise the acquired practical know-how to become “attuned” to the actual and potential contingencies a particular situation entails. But the approach provides no further detail about how this mastery is achieved...

The notion of information processing has dominated the study of the mind for over six decades. However, before the advent of cognitivism, one of the most prominent theoretical ideas was that of Habit. This is a concept with a rich and complex history, which is again starting to awaken interest, following recent embodied, enactive critiques of compu...

An authoritative overview of current research in this exciting interdisciplinary field. Evolutionary robotics (ER) aims to apply evolutionary computation techniques to the design of both real and simulated autonomous robots. The Horizons of Evolutionary Robotics offers an authoritative overview of this rapidly developing field, presenting state-of-...

An authoritative overview of current research in this exciting interdisciplinary field. Evolutionary robotics (ER) aims to apply evolutionary computation techniques to the design of both real and simulated autonomous robots. The Horizons of Evolutionary Robotics offers an authoritative overview of this rapidly developing field, presenting state-of-...

An authoritative overview of current research in this exciting interdisciplinary field. Evolutionary robotics (ER) aims to apply evolutionary computation techniques to the design of both real and simulated autonomous robots. The Horizons of Evolutionary Robotics offers an authoritative overview of this rapidly developing field, presenting state-of-...

Embodied approaches in cognitive science hold that the body is crucial for cognition. What this claim amounts to, however, still remains unclear. This paper contributes to its clarification by confronting three ways of understanding embodiment— the sensorimotor approach, extended cognition and enactivism—with Lockedin syndrome (LIS). LIS is a case...

This is a comment on the article by Gallotti and Frith defending a more enactive approach to social cognition.

Reports an error in "Enaction and Psychology" by Marek McGann, Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo (Review of General Psychology, Advanced Online Publication, May 27, 2013, np). There were several errors in the text of the Online First version of the article. The corrected text is included in the erratum. All versions of this article have been c...

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 17(2) of Review of General Psychology (see record 2013-23324-001). There were several errors in the text of the Online First version of the article. The corrected text is included in the erratum. All versions of this article have been corrected.] The enactive approach to cognitive...

According to the sensorimotor approach, perception is a form of embodied know-how, constituted by lawful regularities in the sensorimotor flow or in sensorimotor contingencies (SMCs) in an active and situated agent. Despite the attention that this approach has attracted, there have been few attempts to define its core concepts formally. In this pap...

As a benchmark multi-objective optimization problem, the project management problem (PMP) usually needs to consider at least three conflicting objectives: cost, time and quality. Most existing methods can only provide an approximation of the true Pareto front to the PMP. We have recently reported an approach which can theoretically guarantee to fin...

Inspired by the natural ripple-spreading phenomenon that occur on a water surface, this paper proposes a novel route optimization method: the ripple-spreading algorithm (RSA). In nature, a ripple spreads at a constant speed in all directions, and the node closest to the source will be the first to be reached. This very simple principle forms the fo...

We use a minimal model of metabolism-based chemotaxis to show how a coupling between metabolism and behavior can affect evolutionary dynamics in a process we refer to as behavioral metabolution. This mutual influence can function as an in-the-moment, intrinsic evaluation of the adaptive value of a novel situation, such as an encounter with a compou...

Inspired by the natural ripple-spreading phenomenon that occurs on a water surface, this paper proposes a novel ripple-spreading algorithm (RSA) for the k shortest paths problem (k-SPP). In nature, a ripple spreads at a constant speed in all directions, and the node closest to the source will be the first to be reached. This very simple principle f...

Dual-process approaches of decision-making examine the interaction between affective/intuitive and deliberative processes underlying value judgment. From this perspective, decisions are supported by a combination of relatively explicit capabilities for abstract reasoning and relatively implicit evolved domain-general as well as learned domain-speci...

Mathematical analysis and modelling is central to infectious disease epidemiology. This paper, inspired by the natural ripple-spreading phenomenon, proposes a novel ripple-spreading network model for the study of infectious disease transmission. The new epidemic model naturally has good potential of capturing many spatial and temporal features obse...

Enactive approaches foreground the role of interpersonal interaction in explanations of social understanding. This motivates, in combination with a recent interest in neuroscientific studies involving actual interactions, the question of how interactive processes relate to neural mechanisms involved in social understanding. We introduce the Interac...

To cope with increasing customer demand and market changes, airline companies need to organize and manage their route networks in a more cost-efficient way. In addition, the robustness of flight operations against unpredictable accidents such as terrorist attacks and natural disasters has become more important to airlines. In this study, the concep...

There is a small but growing community of researchers spanning a spectrum of disciplines which are united in rejecting the still dominant computationalist paradigm in favor of the enactive approach . The framework of this approach is centered on a core set of ideas, such as autonomy, sense-making, emergence, embodiment, and experience. These concep...

The viability of a living system is a non-trivial concept, yet it is often highly simplified in models of adaptive behavior. What is lost in this abstraction? How do viability conditions appear in the first place? In order to address these questions we present a new model of an autopoietic or protocellular system simulated at the molecular level. W...

This paper proposes a deterministic complex network model, which is inspired by the natural ripple-spreading phenomenon. The motivations and main advantages of the model are the following: (i) The establishment of many real-world networks is a dynamic process, where it is often observed that the influence of a few local events spreads out through n...

When genetic algorithms (GAs) are applied to combinatorial problems, permutation representations are usually adopted. As a result, such GAs are often confronted with feasibility and memory-efficiency problems. With the aircraft sequencing problem (ASP) as a study case, this paper reports on a novel binary-representation-based GA scheme for combinat...

The Continuum Companion to Existentialism offers the definitive guide to a key area of modern European philosophy. The book covers the fundamental questions asked by existentialism, providing valuable guidance for students and researchers to some of the many important and enduring contributions of existentialist thinkers. Specially commissioned ess...

Author Summary Traditionally, bacterial chemotaxis has been treated as metabolism-independent. Under this assumption, dedicated chemotaxis signalling pathways operate independently of metabolic processes. There is however, in various strains of bacteria, growing evidence of metabolism-dependent chemotaxis where metabolism modulates behavior. In thi...

This chapter is dedicated to clarifying the central tenets of enactivism and exploring some of the themes currently under development. In this exercise, following the logic of the central ideas of enactivism can sometimes lead to unexpected hypotheses and implications. The value of a new framework must not be underestimated in allowing us to formul...

A comprehensive presentation of an approach that proposes a new account of cognition at levels from the cellular to the social. This book presents the framework for a new, comprehensive approach to cognitive science. The proposed paradigm, enaction, offers an alternative to cognitive science's classical, first-generation Computational Theory of Min...

A comprehensive presentation of an approach that proposes a new account of cognition at levels from the cellular to the social. This book presents the framework for a new, comprehensive approach to cognitive science. The proposed paradigm, enaction, offers an alternative to cognitive science's classical, first-generation Computational Theory of Min...

Spatial, temporal, and modulatory factors affecting the evolvability of GasNets — a style of artificial neural network incorporating an analogue of volume signalling — are investigated. The focus of the article is a comparative study of variants of the GasNet, implementing various spatial, temporal, and modulatory constraints, used as control syste...

We review and discuss the structural consequences of embedding a random network within a metric space such that nodes distributed in this space tend to be connected to those nearby. We find that where the spatial distribution of nodes is maximally symmetrical some of the structural properties of the resulting networks are similar to those of random...

Modern organic metaphors for society have run parallel to the very idea of sociology as a science, starting with Comte and Spencer's use of the term “social organism” (Comte, 1830–42; Spencer, 1897). These metaphors provide a self-renewing source of debate, analogies, and disanalogies. Processes of social regulation, conservation, growth, and repro...

An important shift is taking place in social cognition research, away from a focus on the individual mind and toward embodied and participatory aspects of social understanding. Empirical results already imply that social cognition is not reducible to the workings of individual cognitive mechanisms. To galvanize this interactive turn, we provide an...

In various implementations of genetic algorithms (GAs) to combinatorial optimization problems, permutation representations are often adopted. However, these permutation-representation-based implementations are often confronted with one or more of the following problems: (i) Evolutionary operations may generate infeasible solutions; (ii) The represe...

This paper continues efforts to establish a mutually informative dialogue between psychology and evolutionary robotics in order to investigate the dynamics of social interaction. We replicate a recent simulation model of a minimalist experiment in perceptual crossing and confirm the results with significantly simpler artificial agents. A series of...