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CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognition
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1369820
This article is part of the Research Topic Varieties of Agency: Exploring New Avenues View all 7 articles

Imagination, ecologized and enacted: driven by the historicity of affordance competition

Provisionally accepted
Caroline Stankozi Caroline Stankozi *
  • Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Together, ecological psychology and enactivism can explain imagination as being driven by affordance competition. This paper presents synaptic plasticity as a hotspot for the respective historicity. First, (i) affordances are introduced as directly perceptible on the ecological view, and as co-created by an individual on the enactive view. After pointing out their compatibility, (ii) empirical underpinnings of the historicity of affordance competition are summarized and followed by a nonrepresentational interpretation thereof. They are used to explain: (iii) What affords imagining? After discussing both van Dijk and Rietveld's (2020) non-representational answer and McClelland's (2020) representational one, I propose a more general explanation: a stand-off between competing affordances can be resolved by imagination, driven by affordance competition. Arguably, (iv) the sensorimotor traces of previous interactions (e.g., strengthened synapses) can be repurposed as representations -grounding even representational explanations in an ecologized enactive framework.

    Keywords: Imagination, affordances, Historicity, affordance competition, priming, synaptic plasticity, ecological psychology, Enactivism

    Received: 13 Jan 2024; Accepted: 13 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Stankozi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Caroline Stankozi, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

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