Elise Rietveld
Biographic Data
| ID | 324764 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elise Rietveld |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elise |
| FAMILY NAME | Rietveld |
| SIGNATURE | RIETVELD E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5197-142X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 271 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Desire and Motivation in Predictive Processing: An Ecological-Enactive Perspective
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 compelling response to this challenge has begun to take sh…
Situated imagination
Imagination is often considered the pinnacle of representational cognition. Looking at the concrete details of imagining in context, this paper aims to contribute to the emerging literature that is challenging this representational view by offering a relational and radically situated alternative. On the basis of observing architects in the process of making an architectural art installation, we show how to consider imagination not as de-contextua…
A Rich Landscape of Affordances
.
‘Deep brain stimulation is no ON/OFF-switch’: An ethnography of clinical expertise in psychiatric practice
Despite technological innovations, clinical expertise remains the cornerstone of psychiatry. A clinical expert does not only have general textbook knowledge, but is sensitive to what is demanded for the individual patient in a particular situation. A method that can do justice to the subjective and situation-specific nature of clinical expertise is ethnography. Effective deep brain stimulation (DBS) for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) involve…
The Predictive Dynamics of Happiness and Well-Being
We offer an account of mental health and well-being using the predictive processing framework (PPF). According to this framework, the difference between mental health and psychopathology can be located in the goodness of the predictive model as a regulator of action. What is crucial for avoiding the rigid patterns of thinking, feeling and acting associated with psychopathology is the regulation of action based on the valence of affective states. …
Reflective Situated Normativity
Situated normativity is the ability of skilled individuals to distinguish better from worse, adequate from inadequate, appropriate from inappropriate, or correct from incorrect in the context of a particular situation. Situated normativity consists in a situated appreciation expressed in normative behaviour, and can be experienced as a bodily affective tension that motivates a skilled individual to act on particular possibilities for action offer…
Practical lessons for creating affordance-based interventions for sustainable behavior change
Scaling-up skilled intentionality to linguistic thought
Cognition has traditionally been understood in terms of internal mental representations, and computational operations carried out on internal mental representations. Radical approaches propose to reconceive cognition in terms of agent-environment dynamics. An outstanding challenge for such a philosophical project is how to scale-up from perception and action to cases of what is typically called ‘higher-order’ cognition such as linguistic thought,…
Metastable attunement and real-life skilled behavior
In everyday situations, and particularly in some sport and working contexts, humans face an inherently unpredictable and uncertain environment. All sorts of unpredictable and unexpected things happen but typically people are able to skillfully adapt. In this paper, we address two key questions in cognitive science. First, how is an agent able to bring its previously learned skill to bear on a novel situation? Second, how can an agent be both sens…
The field and landscape of affordances: Koffka’s two environments revisited
The smooth integration of the natural sciences with everyday lived experience is an important ambition of radical embodied cognitive science. In this paper we start from Koffka’s recommendation in his Principles of Gestalt Psychology that to realize this ambition psychology should be a “science of molar behaviour”. Molar behavior refers to the purposeful behaviour of the whole organism directed at an environment that is meaningfully structured fo…
Situated anticipation
In cognitive science, long-term anticipation, such as when planning to do something next year, is typically seen as a form of ‘higher’ cognition, requiring a different account than the more basic activities that can be understood in terms of responsiveness to ‘affordances,’ i.e. to possibilities for action. Starting from architects that anticipate the possibility to make an architectural installation over the course of many months, in this paper …
Situated talking
In ecological psychology language use is not about inferring pre-existing meaning in the mind of the speaker, but it is tied to a practical process of adapting to the environment shared with others. A tension with such a processual account of language appears when we notice that affordances, i.e. the possibilities for action that the environment offers, are often considered meaningful prior to the activities of any particular organism. In this pa…
What’s Inside Your Head Once You’ve Figured Out What Your Head’s Inside Of
In this article, we investigate the foundations for a Gibsonian neuroscience. There is an increasingly influential current in neuroscience based on pragmatic and selectionist principles, which we think can contribute to ecological psychology. Starting from ecological psychology, we identify three basic constraints any Gibsonian neuroscience needs to adhere to: nonreconstructive perception, vicarious functioning, and selectionist self-organization…
The feeling of grip: Novelty, error dynamics, and the predictive brain
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 minimising uncertainty in its encounters with the world eve…
General ecological information supports engagement with affordances for ‘higher’ cognition
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 absent have been characterized by others as requiring ‘hig…
Ecological-Enactive Cognition as engaging with a field of relevant affordances: The Skilled Intentionality Framework (SIF)
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 affordances are central. We call this framework the skilled intentionali…
The anticipating brain is not a scientist: The free-energy principle from an ecological-enactive perspective
In this paper, we argue for a theoretical separation of the free-energy principle from Helmholtzian accounts of the predictive brain. The free-energy principle is a theoretical framework capturing the imperative for biological self-organization in information-theoretic terms. The free-energy principle has typically been connected with a Bayesian theory of predictive coding, and the latter is often taken to support a Helmholtzian theory of percept…
Foregrounding Sociomaterial Practice in Our Understanding of Affordances: The Skilled Intentionality Framework
Social coordination and affordance perception always take part in concrete situations in real life. Nonetheless, the different fields of ecological psychology studying these phenomena do not seem to make this situated nature an object of study. To integrate both fields and extend the reach of the ecological approach, we introduce the Skilled Intentionality Framework (SIF) that situates both social coordination and affordance perception within the…
Self-organization, free energy minimization, and optimal grip on a field of affordances
In this paper, we set out to develop a theoretical and conceptual framework for the new field of Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience. This framework should be able to integrate insights from several relevant disciplines: theory on embodied cognition, ecological psychology, phenomenology, dynamical systems theory, and neurodynamics. We suggest that the main task of Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience is to investigate the phenomenon of ski…
Debating multiculturalism and national identity in Britain: Competing frames
Recent interpretations of policy developments across Europe have suggested a potential tension between multiculturalism and national identity. This article examines how this tension has been understood in British political debate by analysing, as a proxy, debates from the House of Lords. These debates show that four competing frames exist on the relationship between multiculturalism and national identity. These frames offer rival perspectives on …
A Rich Landscape of Affordances
How broad is the class of affordances we can perceive? Affordances (CitationGibson, 1979/1986) are possibilities for action provided to an animal by the environment-by the substances, surfaces, objects, and other living creatures that surround it. A widespread assumption has been that affordances primarily relate to motor action-to locomotion and manual behaviors such as reaching and grasping. We propose an account of affordances according to whi…
Situated Normativity: The Normative Aspect of Embodied Cognition in Unreflective Action
In everyday life we often act adequately, yet without deliberation. For instance, we immediately obtain and maintain an appropriate distance from others in an elevator. The notion of normativity implied here is a very basic one, namely distinguishing adequate from inadequate, correct from incorrect, or better from worse in the context of a particular situation. In the first part of this paper I investigate such ‘situated normativity’ by focusing …
Special Section: The Skillful Body as a Concernful System of Possible Actions
For Merleau-Ponty, consciousness in skillful coping is a matter of prereflective `I can' and not explicit `I think that.' The body unifies many domain-specific capacities. There exists a direct link between the perceived possibilities for action in the situation (`affordances') and the organism's capacities. From Merleau-Ponty's descriptions it is clear that in a flow of skillful actions, the leading `I can' may change from moment to moment witho…
A Rich Landscape of Affordances
How broad is the class of affordances we can perceive? Affordances (CitationGibson, 1979/1986) are possibilities for action provided to an animal by the environment-by the substances, surfaces, objects, and other living creatures that surround it. A widespread assumption has been that affordances primarily relate to motor action-to locomotion and manual behaviors such as reaching and grasping. We propose an account of affordances according to whi…
The anticipating brain is not a scientist: The free-energy principle from an ecological-enactive perspective
In this paper, we argue for a theoretical separation of the free-energy principle from Helmholtzian accounts of the predictive brain. The free-energy principle is a theoretical framework capturing the imperative for biological self-organization in information-theoretic terms. The free-energy principle has typically been connected with a Bayesian theory of predictive coding, and the latter is often taken to support a Helmholtzian theory of percept…
Foregrounding Sociomaterial Practice in Our Understanding of Affordances: The Skilled Intentionality Framework
Social coordination and affordance perception always take part in concrete situations in real life. Nonetheless, the different fields of ecological psychology studying these phenomena do not seem to make this situated nature an object of study. To integrate both fields and extend the reach of the ecological approach, we introduce the Skilled Intentionality Framework (SIF) that situates both social coordination and affordance perception within the…
General ecological information supports engagement with affordances for ‘higher’ cognition
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 absent have been characterized by others as requiring ‘hig…
The feeling of grip: Novelty, error dynamics, and the predictive brain
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 minimising uncertainty in its encounters with the world eve…
The field and landscape of affordances: Koffka’s two environments revisited
The smooth integration of the natural sciences with everyday lived experience is an important ambition of radical embodied cognitive science. In this paper we start from Koffka’s recommendation in his Principles of Gestalt Psychology that to realize this ambition psychology should be a “science of molar behaviour”. Molar behavior refers to the purposeful behaviour of the whole organism directed at an environment that is meaningfully structured fo…
Situated anticipation
In cognitive science, long-term anticipation, such as when planning to do something next year, is typically seen as a form of ‘higher’ cognition, requiring a different account than the more basic activities that can be understood in terms of responsiveness to ‘affordances,’ i.e. to possibilities for action. Starting from architects that anticipate the possibility to make an architectural installation over the course of many months, in this paper …
Scaling-up skilled intentionality to linguistic thought
Cognition has traditionally been understood in terms of internal mental representations, and computational operations carried out on internal mental representations. Radical approaches propose to reconceive cognition in terms of agent-environment dynamics. An outstanding challenge for such a philosophical project is how to scale-up from perception and action to cases of what is typically called ‘higher-order’ cognition such as linguistic thought,…
Metastable attunement and real-life skilled behavior
In everyday situations, and particularly in some sport and working contexts, humans face an inherently unpredictable and uncertain environment. All sorts of unpredictable and unexpected things happen but typically people are able to skillfully adapt. In this paper, we address two key questions in cognitive science. First, how is an agent able to bring its previously learned skill to bear on a novel situation? Second, how can an agent be both sens…
Debating multiculturalism and national identity in Britain: Competing frames
Recent interpretations of policy developments across Europe have suggested a potential tension between multiculturalism and national identity. This article examines how this tension has been understood in British political debate by analysing, as a proxy, debates from the House of Lords. These debates show that four competing frames exist on the relationship between multiculturalism and national identity. These frames offer rival perspectives on …
Situated talking
In ecological psychology language use is not about inferring pre-existing meaning in the mind of the speaker, but it is tied to a practical process of adapting to the environment shared with others. A tension with such a processual account of language appears when we notice that affordances, i.e. the possibilities for action that the environment offers, are often considered meaningful prior to the activities of any particular organism. In this pa…
Situated Normativity: The Normative Aspect of Embodied Cognition in Unreflective Action
In everyday life we often act adequately, yet without deliberation. For instance, we immediately obtain and maintain an appropriate distance from others in an elevator. The notion of normativity implied here is a very basic one, namely distinguishing adequate from inadequate, correct from incorrect, or better from worse in the context of a particular situation. In the first part of this paper I investigate such ‘situated normativity’ by focusing …
Special Section: The Skillful Body as a Concernful System of Possible Actions
For Merleau-Ponty, consciousness in skillful coping is a matter of prereflective `I can' and not explicit `I think that.' The body unifies many domain-specific capacities. There exists a direct link between the perceived possibilities for action in the situation (`affordances') and the organism's capacities. From Merleau-Ponty's descriptions it is clear that in a flow of skillful actions, the leading `I can' may change from moment to moment witho…
Self-organization, free energy minimization, and optimal grip on a field of affordances
In this paper, we set out to develop a theoretical and conceptual framework for the new field of Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience. This framework should be able to integrate insights from several relevant disciplines: theory on embodied cognition, ecological psychology, phenomenology, dynamical systems theory, and neurodynamics. We suggest that the main task of Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience is to investigate the phenomenon of ski…
Debating multiculturalism and national identity in Britain: Competing frames
Recent interpretations of policy developments across Europe have suggested a potential tension between multiculturalism and national identity. This article examines how this tension has been understood in British political debate by analysing, as a proxy, debates from the House of Lords. These debates show that four competing frames exist on the relationship between multiculturalism and national identity. These frames offer rival perspectives on …
A Rich Landscape of Affordances
How broad is the class of affordances we can perceive? Affordances (CitationGibson, 1979/1986) are possibilities for action provided to an animal by the environment-by the substances, surfaces, objects, and other living creatures that surround it. A widespread assumption has been that affordances primarily relate to motor action-to locomotion and manual behaviors such as reaching and grasping. We propose an account of affordances according to whi…
Foregrounding Sociomaterial Practice in Our Understanding of Affordances: The Skilled Intentionality Framework
Social coordination and affordance perception always take part in concrete situations in real life. Nonetheless, the different fields of ecological psychology studying these phenomena do not seem to make this situated nature an object of study. To integrate both fields and extend the reach of the ecological approach, we introduce the Skilled Intentionality Framework (SIF) that situates both social coordination and affordance perception within the…
Ecological-Enactive Cognition as engaging with a field of relevant affordances: The Skilled Intentionality Framework (SIF)
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 affordances are central. We call this framework the skilled intentionali…
The anticipating brain is not a scientist: The free-energy principle from an ecological-enactive perspective
In this paper, we argue for a theoretical separation of the free-energy principle from Helmholtzian accounts of the predictive brain. The free-energy principle is a theoretical framework capturing the imperative for biological self-organization in information-theoretic terms. The free-energy principle has typically been connected with a Bayesian theory of predictive coding, and the latter is often taken to support a Helmholtzian theory of percept…
What’s Inside Your Head Once You’ve Figured Out What Your Head’s Inside Of
In this article, we investigate the foundations for a Gibsonian neuroscience. There is an increasingly influential current in neuroscience based on pragmatic and selectionist principles, which we think can contribute to ecological psychology. Starting from ecological psychology, we identify three basic constraints any Gibsonian neuroscience needs to adhere to: nonreconstructive perception, vicarious functioning, and selectionist self-organization…
The feeling of grip: Novelty, error dynamics, and the predictive brain
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 minimising uncertainty in its encounters with the world eve…
General ecological information supports engagement with affordances for ‘higher’ cognition
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 absent have been characterized by others as requiring ‘hig…
Reflective Situated Normativity
Situated normativity is the ability of skilled individuals to distinguish better from worse, adequate from inadequate, appropriate from inappropriate, or correct from incorrect in the context of a particular situation. Situated normativity consists in a situated appreciation expressed in normative behaviour, and can be experienced as a bodily affective tension that motivates a skilled individual to act on particular possibilities for action offer…
Practical lessons for creating affordance-based interventions for sustainable behavior change
Scaling-up skilled intentionality to linguistic thought
Cognition has traditionally been understood in terms of internal mental representations, and computational operations carried out on internal mental representations. Radical approaches propose to reconceive cognition in terms of agent-environment dynamics. An outstanding challenge for such a philosophical project is how to scale-up from perception and action to cases of what is typically called ‘higher-order’ cognition such as linguistic thought,…
Metastable attunement and real-life skilled behavior
In everyday situations, and particularly in some sport and working contexts, humans face an inherently unpredictable and uncertain environment. All sorts of unpredictable and unexpected things happen but typically people are able to skillfully adapt. In this paper, we address two key questions in cognitive science. First, how is an agent able to bring its previously learned skill to bear on a novel situation? Second, how can an agent be both sens…
The field and landscape of affordances: Koffka’s two environments revisited
The smooth integration of the natural sciences with everyday lived experience is an important ambition of radical embodied cognitive science. In this paper we start from Koffka’s recommendation in his Principles of Gestalt Psychology that to realize this ambition psychology should be a “science of molar behaviour”. Molar behavior refers to the purposeful behaviour of the whole organism directed at an environment that is meaningfully structured fo…
Situated anticipation
In cognitive science, long-term anticipation, such as when planning to do something next year, is typically seen as a form of ‘higher’ cognition, requiring a different account than the more basic activities that can be understood in terms of responsiveness to ‘affordances,’ i.e. to possibilities for action. Starting from architects that anticipate the possibility to make an architectural installation over the course of many months, in this paper …
Situated talking
In ecological psychology language use is not about inferring pre-existing meaning in the mind of the speaker, but it is tied to a practical process of adapting to the environment shared with others. A tension with such a processual account of language appears when we notice that affordances, i.e. the possibilities for action that the environment offers, are often considered meaningful prior to the activities of any particular organism. In this pa…
The Predictive Dynamics of Happiness and Well-Being
We offer an account of mental health and well-being using the predictive processing framework (PPF). According to this framework, the difference between mental health and psychopathology can be located in the goodness of the predictive model as a regulator of action. What is crucial for avoiding the rigid patterns of thinking, feeling and acting associated with psychopathology is the regulation of action based on the valence of affective states. …
‘Deep brain stimulation is no ON/OFF-switch’: An ethnography of clinical expertise in psychiatric practice
Despite technological innovations, clinical expertise remains the cornerstone of psychiatry. A clinical expert does not only have general textbook knowledge, but is sensitive to what is demanded for the individual patient in a particular situation. A method that can do justice to the subjective and situation-specific nature of clinical expertise is ethnography. Effective deep brain stimulation (DBS) for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) involve…
A Rich Landscape of Affordances
.
Desire and Motivation in Predictive Processing: An Ecological-Enactive Perspective
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 compelling response to this challenge has begun to take sh…
Situated imagination
Imagination is often considered the pinnacle of representational cognition. Looking at the concrete details of imagining in context, this paper aims to contribute to the emerging literature that is challenging this representational view by offering a relational and radically situated alternative. On the basis of observing architects in the process of making an architectural art installation, we show how to consider imagination not as de-contextua…
Embodied and Extended Cognition (19 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Affordance (14 works) · Cognitive science (14 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Cognitive psychology (11 works) · Artificial Intelligence (9 works) · Sociology (9 works)