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Ecological psychology is one of the most influential theories of perception in the embodied, antirepresentational, and situated cognitive sciences. However, radical enactivists claim that Gibsonians tend to describe ecological information and its 'pick up' in ways that make ecological psychology close to representational theories of perception and cognition. Motivated by worries about the tenability of classical views of informational content and its processing, these authors claim that ecological psychology needs to be "RECtified" so as to explicitly resist representational readings. In this paper, we argue against this call for RECtification. To do so, we offer a detailed analysis of the notion of perceptual information and other related notions such as specificity and meaning, as they are presented in the specialized ecological literature. We defend that these notions, if properly understood, remain free of any representational commitment. Ecological psychology, we conclude, does not need to be RECtified. Abbreviations: EP = Ecological Psychology REC = Radical Enactivism.Ecological psychology is one of the most influential theories of perception in the embodied, anti-representational, and situated cognitive sciences. However, radical enactivists claim that Gibsonians tend to describe ecological information and its 'pick up' in ways that make ecological psychology close to representational theories of perception and cognition. Motivated by worries about the tenability of classical views of informational content and its processing, these authors claim that ecological psychology needs to be "RECtified" so as to explicitly resist representational readings. In this paper, we argue against this call for RECtification. To do so, we offer a detailed analysis of the notion of perceptual information and other related notions such as specificity and meaning, as they are presented in the specialized ecological literature. We defend that these notions, if properly understood, remain free of any representational commitment. Ecological psychology, we conclude, does not need to be RECtified.

In this paper, we evaluate the pragmatic turn towards embodied, enactive thinking in cognitive science, in the context of recent empirical research on the memory palace technique. The memory palace is a powerful method for remembering yet it faces two problems. First, cognitive scientists are currently unable to clarify its efficacy. Second, the technique faces significant practical challenges to its users. Virtual reality devices are sometimes presented as a way to solve these practical challenges, but currently fall short of delivering on that promise. We address both issues in this paper. First, we argue that an embodied, enactive approach to memory can better help us understand the effectiveness of the memory palace. Second, we present design recommendations for a virtual memory palace. Our theoretical proposal and design recommendations contribute to solving both problems and provide reasons for preferring an embodied, enactive account over an information-processing treatment of the memory palace.T against the background of the so-called 'pragmatic turn' in cognitive science. The pragmatic turn signals a move towards conceiving of cognition as dynamic, embodied and enactive and away from cognition as information-processing (Engel, 2010;Engel, Maye, Kurthen, & König, 2013). Reframing how we think about the cognitive underpinnings of memory will help in the design of the virtual memory palace.What is the advantage of examining the memory palace from the perspective of embodied, enacted cognition? We provide two related incentives. The first stems from the observation that current cognitivist investigations into the workings of the technique, which are based on the information-processing paradigm, have not shed sufficient light on why it is so powerful, as we will elaborate in the next section. 1 This opens the door to the consideration of an alternative paradigm. The second and related reason is that the memory palace, because it leans heavily on memory scaffolding through environmental resources, calls for a cognitive framework which places the role of the body in the environment front and centre.Keeping in mind the pragmatic turn, our paper develops as follows. In Section 2, we will examine current cognitivist approaches to the memory palace technique and show how they are unable to explain its dynamics, concluding that there is, as we call it, an Explanation Problem. Following this, we will argue in Section 3 that current attempts to operationalize the memory palace in virtual reality fall short, because they depend on cognitivist understandings of the technique. Call this the Operationalization Problem. Because addressing the Operationalization Problem first requires addressing the Explanation Problem, we turn to the latter in Section 4, where we argue that an enactive account of the memory palace captures the technique better than its cognitivist rivals. This sets the stage for Section 5, in which we address the Operationalization Problem by presenting design recommendations for designers of virtual memor...

Explaining agency is a significant challenge for those who are interested in the sciences of the mind, and non-representationalists are no exception to this. Even though both ecological psychologists and enactivists agree that agency is to be explained by focusing on the relation between the organism and the environment, they have approached it by focusing on different aspects of the organism-environment relation. In this paper, I offer a suggestion for a radical embodied account of agency that combines ecological psychology with recent trends in enactive cognitive science. According to this proposal, while enactivism focuses primarily on describing how our acquired sensorimotor schemes and habits mutually equilibrate, affecting our tendency to act upon some affordances instead of others, ecological psychology focuses on studying how perceptual information contributes to the actualization of the sensorimotor schemes and habits without mediating representations, inferences, and computations. The paper concludes by briefly exploring how this ecological-enactive theory of agency can account for how socio-cultural norms shape human agency.

Unlike animal behavior, behavior in plants is traditionally assumed to be completely determined either genetically or environmentally. Under this assumption, plants are usually considered to be noncognitive organisms. This view nonetheless clashes with a growing body of empirical research that shows that many sophisticated cognitive capabilities traditionally assumed to be exclusive to animals are exhibited by plants too. Yet, if plants can be considered cognitive, even in a minimal sense, can they also be considered conscious? Some authors defend that the quest for plant consciousness is worth pursuing, under the premise that sentience can play a role in facilitating plant's sophisticated behavior. The goal of this article is not to provide a positive argument for plant cognition and consciousness, but to invite a constructive, empirically informed debate about it. After reviewing the empirical literature concerning plant cognition, we introduce the reader to the emerging field of plant neurobiology. Research on plant electrical and chemical signaling can help shed light into the biological bases for plant sentience. To conclude, we shall present a series of approaches to scientifically investigate plant consciousness. In sum, we invite the reader to consider the idea that if consciousness boils down to some form of biological adaptation, we should not exclude a priori the possibility that plants have evolved their own phenomenal experience of the world.