Enaction Research
Perception under influence
Visual perception is usually described as the recording of a world that is simply there, the same for everyone. My work, like the enactive tradition it belongs to, describes something else: a perceptual system continuously tuned to the state of the organism, to its possibilities for action, and to the contexts with which it is coupled, up to the social context.
Several factors modulate that tuning; I have studied a number of them experimentally:
These influences are not biases to be corrected, nor noise around some "true" perception. They are constitutive: this is how an organism brings forth a world on its own scale. The Multiscale Enaction Model is an attempt to formalise it.
The approach
The Multiscale Enaction Model (MEM) holds that vision is coupled with systems whose scales range at least from the cellular to the social-economical. Its distinctive claim is not to fix a list of levels, but to make the relevant scale flexible: it depends on the coupling under study.
The model thus departs from Gibson's ecological approach — systemic, yet confined to a single scale, that of the perception–action coupling. To it, MEM adds an embodied teleology: the needs of the organism, from cellular demands to motivation, exert pressure on what the eye seeks out.
This work draws on mixed methods — eye-tracking, electrophysiological recording, self-report measures, psychometric studies and systematic reviews — to grasp behavioural, phenomenological and physiological processes as coordinated patterns rather than independent layers.
Selected work