Special Issue On Enactive Interfaces

摘要

In every-day life people interact with their surroundings in a direct manner. Whenever we handle an object, we get an intuitive feeling of its properties and its affordances. Likewise, the object is influenced directly by our actions: when an object is picked up by a person, this object moves according to the energy created and forces exerted by this person. In fact, a loop can be identified between the person and the object, more precisely between the gestures (actions) and the haptic feedback. This implies that the consequences of one's action have an immediate feedback. This forms the basis for enactive knowledge: procedural knowledge, stored in the form of motor responses and acquired by doing (Pasquinelli and Steward, 2007). This kind of knowledge is complementary to the other kinds of human knowledge: symbolic knowledge, which can be seen as the abstract knowledge needed for reasoning; and iconic knowledge, which is based on visual information and recognition (Bruner, 1966).