Zuzanna Rucinska

Background/Objectives: People living with depression often experience consistent disruptions in their experience of time, which further contributes to their suffering. We present a scoping review on virtual reality (VR)-based interventions for depression, addressing temporal processing and subjective experiences of time. The paper aims to explore the extent to which therapeutic interventions using VR target the temporal dimension of patients’ experiences. Methods: We conducted a scoping review using the PRISMA 2020 standard. The literature search was further extended using Research Rabbit and by examining the reference lists of relevant articles. Seventeen papers were selected for final analysis. Results: Our scoping review indicates that temporality in VR-based therapeutic interventions for depression remains underrepresented. Of the seventeen papers reviewed, only two explicitly deal with this issue, while the rest touch upon it briefly or implicitly. The studies suggest that VR’s main advantage in modifying the experience of time in depression is its potential to generate immersion and to scaffold imagination through visualization. The main limitations are methodological: most of the available research is exploratory, reports short-term effects, and utilizes a broad variety of empirical designs and therapeutic approaches.

This chapter examines suicidality and suicidal ambivalence through the lens of situated cognition. It examines how contextual factors can actively influence and shape the decision-making process and behavior of a person in the context of suicide, by focusing on the impact of means restriction and the role of other people in prevention of suicide in public spaces. The chapter argues that rethinking suicidality from the perspective of situated cognition offers valuable insights for our understanding of suicidality and suicidal ambivalence, as it is well placed to address both the physical and the social context of the suicidal person. We apply the relational concept of affordances, and introduce the concept of “suicidal affordances”, to show how specific material and socio-cultural environments offer possibilities for dying by suicide, to which the agent might be responsive. Our situated perspective offers a new look on suicidal agency, decision-making processes and the desire to end one’s life, as already situated and actively shaped by the environment and its affordances. The chapter thereby inspires rethinking currently prevailing approaches to suicidal ambivalence and decision-making that are focused on individual and interpersonal factors, accounting for the effectiveness of environmental interventions, and opening new avenues for research.

Introspection is often conceptualized as a “purely inner” activity, whereby the introspector temporarily breaks their coupling with the external world to focus on their “inner world”. We offer a substantially different picture of introspection. Inspired by radically embodied cognitive science, we argue that introspective processes delivering substantial self-knowledge consist of embodied, world-involving activities wherein the introspector remains coupled with the world in specific, controlled ways. Our argument unfolds as follows: after a brief introduction (Sect. 1), we provide a minimal account of introspection (Sect. 2 ) followed by a brief introduction to radically embodied views of the mind (Sect. 3 ). Then, in Sect. 4, we present in detail a case of radical embodied introspection (Sect. 4.1 ); we argue that that case is indeed a case of introspection (Sect. 4.2 ), and finally we defend our claim from some foreseeable objections (Sect. 4.3 ). In Sect. 5 we offer other examples, showing that radically embodied introspection is a widespread and varied phenomenon. Lastly, Sect. 6 concludes the paper sketching some morals to be drawn from our examples. The appendix briefly situates our view in the broader epistemological landscape.

Enactive approaches to cognition argue that cognition, including pretense, comes about through the dynamical interaction of agent and environment. Applied to cognition, these approaches cast cognition as an activity an agent performs interacting in specific ways with her environment. This view is now under significant pressure: in a series of recent publications, Peter Langland-Hassan has proposed a number of arguments which purportedly should lead us to conclude that enactive approaches are unable to account for pretense without paying a way too severe theoretical price. In this paper, we will defend enactive approaches to pretense, arguing that they can in fact explain pretense without incurring in the negative theoretical consequences Peter Langland-Hassan fears. To this effect, we start by exposing Langland-Hassan’s challenge (§2), to then highlight its core assumptions and demonstrate their falsity (§3). Having done so, we argue that none of the theoretical consequences Langland-Hassan fears follow (§4), and in fact enactive approaches to cognition may be explanatorily superior to the one Langland-Hassan favors (§5). A brief conclusion will then follow (§6).

Enactive approaches to cognition argue that cognition, including pretense, comes about through the dynamical interaction of agent and environment. Applied to cognition, these approaches cast cognition as an activity an agent performs interacting in specific ways with her environment. This view is now under significant pressure: in a series of recent publications, Peter Langland-Hassan has proposed a number of arguments which purportedly should lead us to conclude that enactive approaches are unable to account for pretense without paying a way too severe theoretical price. In this paper, we will defend enactive approaches to pretense, arguing that they can in fact explain pretense without incurring in the negative theoretical consequences Peter Langland-Hassan fears. To this effect, we start by exposing Langland-Hassan’s challenge (§2), to then highlight its core assumptions and demonstrate their falsity (§3). Having done so, we argue that none of the theoretical consequences Langland-Hassan fears follow (§4), and in fact enactive approaches to cognition may be explanatorily superior to the one Langland-Hassan favors (§5). A brief conclusion will then follow (§6).

Do we perceive or do we imagine virtual entities in virtual reality games? There are, to date, two mainstream answers in the literature to this question: the answer of the fictionalists, which is that we must imagine virtual entities for they are fictional, and the answer of the realists, which is that we directly perceive virtual entities since they are digital. In this article, I put another option on the table, and argue that following a particular embodied and enactive take oni magination (what I will call EEI), imagination can play a specific role in our experience of virtual entities. Specifically, imagination is involved in anticipating virtual affordances (or in-game actions possibilities), and in allowing one to be creative within the game context. The view ultimately endorses a relational instead of a representational view of imagination: instead of representing unreal fictional entities, it showcases that imagination is a context-dependent process shaped by the interactions found within the virtual games.

The project of this paper is to synthesize enactivist cognitive science and practice theory in order to develop a new account of pretend play. Pretend play is usually conceived of as a representationalist phenomenon where a pretender projects a fictional mental representation onto reality. It thus seems that pretense can only be explained in representationalist terms. In this paper, we oppose this usual approach. We instead propose not only new explanatory tools for pretend play, but also a fundamental reconceptualization of the phenomena of pretend play, that is, of the very explanandum of theories of pretense. To do so, we suggest combining the turn to action and embodiment in the cognitive sciences with the practice turn in the humanities. From our point of view, pretend play has to be seen in its role in human life as a whole, which is to help children to learn to master the complex sociocultural contingencies of the manifold social practices that make up social reality. Pretend play should therefore be conceived as alternative sense-making that is always related, in varying ways, to ordinary social practices. Pretenders do not need to project mental representations onto reality, but make sense of their surroundings in different ways than encultured adults in ordinary practices. In the paper, we spell out this view and show how it enables an enactivist reconceptualization of imagination, intentions and knowledge, which are usually thought of as being available only to representationalist accounts of pretense.

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 ASD that makes use of metaphors. It concludes by outlining some theoretical insights into the imaginative skills of children with ASD that follow from taking the embodied-enactive perspective and proposes suggestions for interactive interventions to further enhance imaginative skills and metaphor understanding in children with ASD.

This paper presents pretending as an enacted and fundamentally social activity. First, it demonstrates why we should think of pretense as inherently social. Then, it shows how that fact affects our theory in terms of what is needed in order to pretend. Standardly, pretense is seen as requiring a mechanism that allows one to bypass the “obvious” re- sponse to the environment in order to opt for a symbolic response; that mechanism is im- aginative and representational. This paper shows that the Enactive Account of Pretense reconsiders the idea that one needs to respond to an absent environment when pretending, proposing instead that socially con- stituted perceptual affordances for play allow for non-obvious ways of responding to the present environment. The enactive account of pretense suggests that one need not posit special cognitive pretense mechanisms and mental scripts in order to account for pretend- ing, as available capacities for active perception and re-enactment of routines suffice. This paper concludes with suggestions for the kinds of cognitive skills that should be sought out to explain pretense.

The project of this paper is to synthesize enactivist cognitive science and practice theory in order to develop a new account of pretend play. Pretend play is usually conceived of as a representationalist phenomenon where a pretender projects a fictional mental representation onto reality. It thus seems that pretense can only be explained in representationalist terms. In this paper, we oppose this usual approach. We instead propose not only new explanatory tools for pretend play, but also a fundamental reconceptualization of the phenomena of pretend play, that is, of the very explanandum of theories of pretense. To do so, we suggest combining the turn to action and embodiment in the cognitive sciences with the practice turn in the humanities. From our point of view, pretend play has to be seen in its role in human life as a whole, which is to help children to learn to master the complex sociocultural contingencies of the manifold social practices that make up social reality. Pretend play should therefore be conceived as alternative sense-making that is always related, in varying ways, to ordinary social practices. Pretenders do not need to project mental representations onto reality, but make sense of their surroundings in different ways than encultured adults in ordinary practices. In the paper, we spell out this view and show how it enables an enactivist reconceptualization of imagination, intentions and knowledge, which are usually thought of as being available only to representationalist accounts of pretense.

This paper considers the epistemic role that embodiment plays in imagining. We focus on two aspects of embodied cognition understood in its strong sense: explicit motoric processes related to performance, and neuronal processes rooted in bodily and action processes, and describe their role in imagining. The paper argues that these two aspects of strongly embodied cognition can play distinctive and positive roles in constraining imagining, thereby complementing Amy Kind's argument for the epistemic relevance of imagination "under constraints" and Magdalena Balcerak Jackson's argument for justification by imagination.

This paper analyzes the skilled performance of rock climbing through the framework of Embodied and Enacted Cognitive Science. It introduces a notion of enactive planning that is part of one mindful activity of ongoing responsiveness to the affordances of the wall. The paper takes two distinct planning activities involved in rock climbing—route-reading and visualizing—and clarifies them through the enactivist and ecological concepts of nested affordances, prospecting, recalibrating, marking, and corporeal imaginings, as well as Rylean concept of heeding. The paper shows that an enactive approach to planning can make sense of both the planning done in preparation of the climb, and re-planning done during the mindful performance, without invoking additional cognitive architectures.

In this paper we explore the notion of rehearsal as a way to develop an embodied and enactive account of imagining. After reviewing the neuroscience of motor imagery, we argue, in the context of performance studies, that rehearsal includes forms of imagining that involve motor processes. We draw on Sartre’s phenomenology of imagining which also suggests that imagining involves motor processes. This research in neuroscience and phenomenology, supports the idea of an embodied and enactive account of imagination.

In this paper, we argue that several recent ‘wide’ perspectives on cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed) are only partially relevant to the study of cognition. While these wide accounts override traditional methodological individualism, the study of cognition has already progressed beyond these proposed perspectives towards building integrated explanations of the mechanisms involved, including not only internal submechanisms but also interactions with others, groups, cognitive artifacts, and their environment. The claim is substantiated with reference to recent developments in the study of “mindreading” and debates on emotions. We claim that the current practice in cognitive (neuro)science has undergone, in effect, a silent mechanistic revolution, and has turned from initial binary oppositions and abstract proposals towards the integration of wide perspectives with the rest of the cognitive (neuro)sciences.

This paper will explore one aspect of the relationship between pretence and narratives. I look at proposals about how scripts play guiding roles in our pretend play practices. I then examine the views that mental representations are needed to guide pretend play, reviewing two importantly different pictures of mental guiders: the Propositional Account and the Model Account. Both accounts are individualistic and internalistic; the former makes use of language-like representations, the latter makes use of models, maps and images. The paper will discuss some worries with the notion of mental guiders, and offer some positive suggestions about what else might be playing the guiding role in pretence. I propose that environmental affordances and socially scaffolded engagements provide the basis of pretence guiders, and suggest that engagement in narrative practices further frames and allows elaborations of acts of pretend play. I take first steps in developing a new embodied, enactive and intersubjective understanding of pretence, showing why it is a viable alternative to the mental representational accounts of pretence