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Information Experience is a recent and growing concept in Information Science that is proposed as a holistic approach to explicitly examine the human experience of information interactions, including an individual's perceptual, cognitive and embodied experience. Valuable to this discussion is setting out a suitable philosophical position about the conception of the mind. This paper proposes that the concepts of embodied cognition and the non‐representational, enactive mind are necessary conceptions of mind for an adequate theoretical account of Information Experience. Furthering this discussion, the concept of information as an enactive cognitive phenomenon is explored, as constructed by the individual, embodied by their experience and contextually situated. These conceptions will provide a foundation for further development of the emerging field of information experience, and prove thought provoking for the Information Science field generally in the development of new approaches to the ways we use and share information in our communities and the future technologies we build for this.

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The context-sensitivity of cognition has been demonstrated across a wide range of cognitive functions such as perception, memory, judgement and decision making. A related term, ‘contextuality’, has appeared from the field of quantum cognition, with mounting empirical evidence demonstrating that cognitive phenomena are sometimes contextual. Contextuality is a subtle notion that influences how we must view the properties of the cognitive phenomenon being studied. This article addresses the questions: What does it mean for a cognitive phenomenon to be contextual? What are the implications of contextuality for probabilistic models of cognition? How does contextuality differ from context-sensitivity? Starting from George Boole’s “conditions of possible experience”, we argue that a probabilistic model of a cognitive phenomenon is necessarily subject to an assumption of realism. By this we mean that the phenomenon being studied is assumed to have cognitive properties with a definite value independent of observation. In contrast, quantum cognition holds that a cognitive property maybe indeterminate, i.e., its properties do not have well established values prior to observation. We argue that indeterminacy is sufficient for incompatibility between cognitive properties. In turn, incompatibility is necessary fortheir contextuality. The significance of this argument for cognitive psychology is the following: if a cognitive phenomenon is found to be contextual, then there is reason to believe it may be indeterminate. We illustrate by means of two crowdsourced experiments how context-sensitivity and contextuality of cognitive properties in the form of facial trait judgements can be characterized from empirical data. Finally, we conceptually and formally contrast contextuality with context-sensitivity. We propose that both involve a form of context dependence, with causalitybeing the differentiating factor: the context dependence in context-sensitivity has a causal basis, whereas the context dependence in contextuality is acausal. The resulting implications forprobabilistic models of cognition are discussed.