The classification of behaviour has historically been done using one of the two approaches, either through the hypothetical causes (such as ‘instincts’, ‘drives’ and ‘needs’) or through the cataloguing of the observable form of behaviour using an ethogram. This article offers an alternative framework for classification of behaviour based upon only the behavioural outcomes. The framework is specified

In 2012, John Stewart contributed a book manuscript entitled “Questioning Life and Cognition: Some Foundational Issues in the Paradigm of Enaction” to the Enaction Series in Online Collaborative Publishing, edited by Olivier Gapenne and Bruno Bachimont. Along with Mattéo Mossio, I was invited by Olivier to serve as a glossator of this text. The purpose was to thereby continue our long and fruitful

This editorial presents the context of the special issue and some basic elements of John’s Stewart biography.

Breathing Life into Biology is a brave attempt to do science while wearing its values on its sleeves. It is written under the commitment that life is intrinsically valuable, and its value has to be taken seriously in doing biology. Stewart defends a conception of life in which every living organism has a subjective point of view from which it makes sense of the world. Under this conception and the

Genetic reductionism is increasingly seen as a severely limited approach to understanding living systems. The Neo-Darwinian explanatory framework tends to overlook the role of the organism for an understanding of development and evolution. In the current fast-changing theoretical landscape, the autopoietic approach provides conceptual distinctions and tools that may contribute to building an alternative

The aim of this article is to offer a new approach of perception regarding the position of a distant object. It is also a tribute to John Stewart who accompanied the first stages of this research. Having already examined the difficulties surrounding questions of the perception of exteriority within the framework of enactive approaches, we will proceed in two stages. The first stage will consist of

Human–swarm interaction is a frontier in the realms of swarm robotics and human-factors engineering. However, no holistic theory has been explicitly formulated that can inform how humans and robot swarms should interact through an interface while considering real-world demands, the relative capabilities of the components, as well as the desired joint-system behaviours. In this article, we apply a holistic

The purpose of this study was to examine the variability and coordination of postural adaptations in normal weight children and those with overweight in running and hopping. Fifty-six boys between 7 and 10 years were classified into groups as overweight (n = 33) or normal-weight (n = 23). They performed two trials of running and hopping over a 20-m straight line distance. Accelerometers were attached

We advance a critical examination of two recent branches of the enactivist research program, namely, Radically Enactive Cognition and Linguistic Bodies. We argue that, although these approaches may look like diverging views within the wider enactivist program, when appraised in a conciliatory spirit, they can be interpreted as developing converging ideas. We examine how the notion of know-how figures

This article considers human motor skills based on the concept of the hierarchical organisation of living systems. This concept considers apparently opposite phenomena (e.g. consistency-variability) as complementary and as contemplated in the same structure. The hierarchy in open systems is characterised by three main relativities: (a) whole and parts, (b) control and (c) variability. From a hierarchical

Dual-process theories divide cognition into two kinds of processes: Type 1 processes that are autonomous and do not use working memory, and Type 2 processes that are decoupled from the immediate situation and use working memory. Often, Type 1 processes are also fast, high capacity, parallel, nonconscious, biased, contextualized, and associative, while Type 2 processes are typically slow, low capacity

In this commentary on Rietveld’s inaugural lecture, we exemplify with one of our design cases for project Expedition RWS 2050, how Rietveld’s and our method are complementary. Within this project, RWS invited us to contribute our design skills and make relevant future scenarios experienceable. To scaffold imaginative discussions about everyday life in 2050 with a cross-section of the Dutch population

The text presents a discussion of possible connections between the ideas of Erik Rietveld and concepts of relationality and materiality in modern architecture, with a special focus on Dutch Structuralism and the New Brutalism.

In response to Erik Rietveld’s text “The affordances of art for making technologies,” this commentary probes art’s affordances for what Rietveld calls behavioral “changeability.” I ask, how can a view of art’s affordances help to better understand collective and relational affects and habitual behaviors? Can artworks help to “radically change the affordances available in our surroundings,” to generate

Rather than conserving or ignoring historically burdened heritage, RAAAF intervene. Their responses are striking, sometimes dramatic or destructive. Prompted by Rietveld’s discussion of the Luftschloss project, I compare some other places with difficult pasts which engage our embodied and sensory responses, without such active redirection or disruption. Ross Gibson’s concept of a ‘memoryscope’ helps

General value functions (GVFs) in the reinforcement learning (RL) literature are long-term predictive summaries of the outcomes of agents following specific policies in the environment. Affordances as perceived action possibilities with specific valence may be cast into predicted policy-relative goodness and modeled as GVFs. A systematic explication of this connection shows that GVFs and especially

In Erik Rietveld’s inaugural lecture “The Affordances of Art for Making Technologies,” art is presented as a valuable avenue to enrich the environment with material and social affordances that may enhance human meaning giving practices. In this contribution, I make a distinction between conventional and unconventional practices and argue for an account of sociomateriality that covers the whole spectrum

The adaptive morphology of a robot, such as shape adaptation, plays a significant role in adapting its behaviors. Shape adaptation should ideally be achieved without considerable cost, like the power required to deform the robot’s body, and therefore, it is reasonably considered as the last resort in classical rigid robots. However, the last decade has seen an increasing interest in soft robots: robots

We introduce a method that permits to co-evolve the body and the control properties of robots. It can be used to adapt the morphological traits of robots with a hand-designed morphological bauplan or to evolve the morphological bauplan as well. Our results indicate that robots with co-adapted body and control traits outperform robots with fixed hand-designed morphologies. Interestingly, the advantage

The ability to change one’s behaviour based on past experience has obvious fitness benefits. Drawing from past experience requires some kind of information storage and retrieval. The acellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum has previously been shown to use stored information about negative stimuli. Here, we repeatedly exposed the slime mould to three stimuli with differing levels of potential risk:

In this commentary, I raise one question and one critical comment about Rietveld’s normative claim that ‘artistic practices afford embedding technologies better in society’ (2019, p. 5). In what exact sense is this the case? It seems that Rietveld offers two interconnected but conceptually distinct answers to this question. The first focuses on art’s habit-breaking possibilities. The second concerns

In recent decades, several theories have claimed to explain the teleological causality of organisms as a function of self-organising and self-producing processes. The most widely cited theories of this sort are variations of autopoiesis, originally introduced by Maturana and Varela. More recent modifications of autopoietic theory have focused on system organisation, closure of constraints and autonomy

The response asks about the relationship between artist and audience in the RAAAF artworks. Is the artist an Autonomous Innovator who breaches the ties with the past and the environment? Or is the aesthetic practice located in the creation of relationships around these objects, hence expanding the artwork by using know-how, experiences and enthusiasm of the audience/users?

This short note addresses the question whether Rietveld’s account of visual arts and adaptive behaviour be extended to literature.

Starting from the understanding of architecture as an existential art, this commentary highlights the relevance of Rietveld’s view on the affordances of art for making technologies in two ways: (a) first, by discussing the value of the notion of affordances for educating architecture students in thinking what a space can do and increasing their sensitivity for understanding and incorporating the diversity

This contribution takes as point of departure the particular response-ability allowed by the contemporary choreographic performance works of settler (Canadian) visual artist Karen Ginger Guttman, in which the visitor-beholder’s body becomes involved in the choreographic ‘dance’. These site-situated works echo the Rietveld’s works, but Guttman’s site performances take place in a residential environment

Rietveld discusses three skills that artistic practices have to offer to makers of technologies for embedding such technologies in society. An ecological dynamics model of skill learning empowers the embedding of Rietveld’s described skills in three social domains: technology makers, artworkers, and visitors of such artworks.

Upon starting a collective endeavour, it is important to understand your partners’ preferences and how strongly they commit to a common goal. Establishing a prior commitment or agreement in terms of posterior benefits and consequences from those engaging in it provides an important mechanism for securing cooperation. Resorting to methods from Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT), here we analyse how prior

Responding to Erik Rietveld’s inaugural lecture, this commentary asks which bodies and what sites of design and architecture are centralized when thinking about “The Affordances of Art for Making Technologies”? Departing from personal experience and Nicholas Mirzoeff’s counterhistory of visuality, I analyze what it means to imagine “the end of sitting.” Through an engagement with crip theory and disability

We commend Rietveld’s affordance-based approach to art and architecture for foregrounding an oft-neglected area in the cognitive sciences: the material dimension of human cognition, creativity and imagination. We suggest that supplementing the cross-disciplinary approach that Rietveld calls for with insights from archaeology and anthropology can not only help us create futures ‘with human touch’ but

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of freedom of relevant choice, that is, associated with performance success, on the motor learning. Forty players of both sexes (21.2 ± 2.4 years) participated in the study and were divided into four experimental groups: alternated, random, choice, and yoked. The task was the Handball 7-m throw, in specific right and left side throw. Participants

The work of Rietveld and his colleagues offers an engaging and valuable framework for considering the relationship between art, technology, culture and habit, and challenges us to consider our ethical perspective on these things.

Gibson once suggested that his ecological approach could provide architecture and design with a new theoretical basis. Erik Rietveld takes up this suggestion—the concept of affordances figures prominently not only in his philosophical and scientific work but also in the design practices he is engaged in. However, as Gibson introduced affordances as a functional concept, it seems ill-suited to capture

Rietveld’s conception of artistic practices and artworks allows us to engage with nature in a radically different manner: in a way that is more active and alive than we routinely do within the practices of philosophy and cognitive sciences. I argue that Rietveld’s material playgrounds allow us to challenge our understanding of matter as purely passive and devoid of agency; they show us that nature’s

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.

Responsiveness to affordances that are salient in our conventional practices is usually automatic and unreflective—for good reasons. Responsiveness to unconventional affordances, by contrast, must be enforced. This is what artistic interventions of studio RAAAF do. I argue that it is precisely the fact that affordances are more or less forced on us that makes it possible for us to relate to them freely

It is usually a mark of good design when technologies and tools that mediate goal-directed action are such that the user’s attentional focus is maintained on the intended ends of action rather than on the technologies and tools themselves. When the mediators become the focus, the continuity of goal-directed action is disrupted, and the flow of action can be re-directed. What then is the purpose of

We take the approach developed by Rietveld and RAAAF to be a paradigm example of a much-needed development in embodied cognitive science: applying the insights gained into the nature of cognition back to embodied cognition itself, back to the practice of bodily engagements with our sociocultural environments. Rietveld’s work is groundbreaking precisely because it stands almost alone as a prototype

Aggregation, a widely observed behavior in social insects, is the gathering of individuals on any location or on a cue. The former being called the self-organized aggregation, and the latter being called the cue-based aggregation. One of the fascinating examples of cue-based aggregation is the thermotactic behavior of young honeybees. Young honeybees aggregate on optimal temperature zones in the hive

This reflection on Erik Rietveld’s The Affordances of Art for Making Technologies addresses, first, what it is to engage in material philosophy and make material propositions and then, second, what different materialities, or rather different ways of handling materialities, allow material philosophers to say. It notes that solidity is not an intrinsic property of any stuff. If only they are handled

Erik Rietveld’s lecture describes the creation of architectural works from the point of view of the architects. We are curious about architectural space as a living system: what happens once the architects have left? We introduce the space syntax notion of virtual community, and suggest that this is compatible with Rietveld’s distinction between the field and the landscape of affordances.

The explosion of online knowledge has made knowledge, paradoxically, difficult to find. A web or journal search might retrieve thousands of articles, ranked in a manner that is biased by, for example, popularity or eigenvalue centrality rather than by informed relevance to the complex query. With hundreds of thousands of articles published each year, the dense, tangled thicket of knowledge grows even

Sensorimotor theory of perception has been criticized for its ambiguity about the need for internal representations and the lack of a proper account of agency and subjective experience. The book under review offers a compelling non-representational, world-involving interpretation, and operationalization of this theory, showing that alternatives to representationalism are viable. It also provides a

Peer-to-peer learning paradigm is seldom used in studying how farmers can increase yield. In this article, agent-based modelling has been applied to study the chances of dairy farmers increasing an...

Taking up Rietveld’s challenge for philosophers to join with artists in investigating the questions of how to live better, this comment argues (a) that this conjunction of philosophy and art is alr...

Postural control is a complex process requiring both sensory and motor responses. Perturbation-based balance training has emerged as an effective fall prevention intervention, which provides physic...

In this study, we use mobile robots as physical entities to model the iterated learning of collections of forms that consist of randomly generated movement sequences. The robots implement an abstra...

In this article, an adaptive consensus model that considers individual disappointment emotion is proposed for emergency multi-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM) problems with hesitant fuzzy li...

In this article, I aim to elucidate minimality in cooperation by drawing on a previously developed multi-dimensional approach to cooperation. This approach provides a useful framework to locate any...

This article considers the adaptive setting and probable origins of human aesthetic capabilities, using evidence of the Acheulean tradition in the last million years, and highlighting the importanc...

It has been claimed that post-cognitivist approaches to cognition might be compatible with computationalism. A growing number of authors argue that if computations are theorized as non-representati...

This essay introduces a special issue focused on 4E cognition (cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) in the Lower Palaeolithic. In it, we review the typological and representatio...

The purpose of this article is to review the evolution and function of the cerebellum, particularly in regard to its role in creativity and expert stone knapping. First, the article reviews the his...

This study aimed to examine the effects of age and the task difficulty on postural sway, variability and complexity. The participants were 90 able-bodied individuals from children (n = 39; age: 5.89 ± 0.94 years), young adults (n = 30; age: 23.23 ± 1.61 years) and older adults (n = 21; age: 64.59 ± 5.24 years) that took part in different balance tasks that were had different levels of cognitive and

Through brain-inspired modeling studies, cognitive neurorobotics aims to resolve dynamics essential to different emergent phenomena at the level of embodied agency in an object environment shared w...

How the boundaries of the mind should be drawn with respect to action and the material world is a core research question that cognitive archaeology shares with contemporary cognitive sciences. The ...

Organized as a satellite to the annual Conference on Complex Systems, the Evolution of Cultural Complexity held its inaugural workshop in Tempe, Arizona, in 2015, a second in Cancún, Mexico, in 2017, and a third in Thessaloniki, Greece, in 2018. The goal of those satellite sessions was to bring together a community of researchers from different fields who had interests in the evolution of cultural

The aim of this study was to determine the effect of contextual interference on learning of adapted sailing for people with spinal cord injury. Seven participants with traumatic spinal injury were ...

Tool use can be considered in terms of purposeful behaviour. This emphasis on ‘purpose’ hides a host of assumptions about the nature of cognition and its relationship with physical activity. In par...

While ecological psychology and embodied approaches to cognition have gained traction within the literature on non-human primate tool use, a fear of making assumptions on behalf of animal minds mea...