Abstract
An increasing number of studies in cognitive science challenge traditional views that position the brain as the exclusive or central mechanism of cognition, particularly those that frame it as a standalone computational unit. Understanding cognition as emerging through brain-body-environment relationships necessitates moving away from disembodied accounts of the mind and the “computer” metaphor of the brain, which oversimplifies the process by which cognition arises. An alternative view is that of a resonating brain-body system that can become attuned to the different rhythms of the (built) environment. This implies a capacity to actively sense and attend to subtle differences perceived through sensorimotor and affective engagement. This perspective article builds on the idea of natural attunement to environmental rhythms and examines it in relation to affectivity. Specifically, it integrates insights from current work on situated affectivity with non-representational concepts associated with the notion of rhythm to identify future direction for research and architectural design. The emerging themes challenge traditional approaches highlighting an often-overlooked aspect in studies of cognition and architecture: how events in the body, brain, and surrounding environment change over time.
1 Introduction
There is a growing recognition that brain and body rhythms (e.g., breathing, circadian rhythms) are often engaged in coupling processes and dynamic coordination, influencing how we perceive and evaluate our environment (Varga and Heck, 2017; ; ; ). argues that the body-brain can be conceived as a single rhythmic hierarchical system since the coordination of body-brain oscillations (e.g., lung-heart couplings) involves different frequencies that follow specific coupling principles. According to , the hierarchy of brain–body rhythms, where slower bodily rhythms modulate faster neural oscillations, is closely linked to the experience of time. The coupling of multiple oscillations allows the brain–body system to track bodily and emotional changes across multiple timescales, providing a temporal organizing mechanism. Crucially, these processes are sensitive to affective states: physiological rhythms such as heartbeat, easily modulated by arousal, can expand or contract subjective time (; ), which reflects the ability to adjust and synchronize with external rhythms and collective activity (). Thus, as argues, time is a relational measure of change, grounded in events within the brain, the body, and the surrounding environment. Accordingly, rhythmic coordination of different oscillations is not confined to an individual’s physiological boundaries. It extends beyond the skin, influencing and being influenced by interactions with the environment. Evidence suggests that respiratory rhythms, for example, modulate neural oscillations, influencing perceptual, affective and cognitive dimensions (Varga and Heck, 2017; ; ). Yet, external factors can also influence such brain-breathing couplings (). Therefore, it is unreasonable to assume that body-brain rhythms function independently of external rhythmic phenomena, as empirical evidence suggests that dynamic coupling plays a role in their orchestration (; ).
Ecological-enactive approaches to cognition (; ; Varela et al., 1992; ; e.g.; Warren, 2006) and the notion of direct perception bring to the foreground phenomena associated with dynamic couplings (e.g., coordination, resonance) and relational structures that enable such couplings. From this perspective, perceiving, acting, and knowing are emergent properties of the agent-environment system, shaped by continuous interactions with external rhythms and affordances. For instance, the self-organizing phenomenon of sensorimotor dynamics (Thelen et al., 1987; ) or the cyclical perception-action coupling process is a key concept to understanding how we interact and detect environmental information (; Djebbara et a., 2021). The agent’s movement, including body parts, is shaped by sensory stimulation across modalities that co-occur in reciprocally interacting cycles. Sensorimotor dynamics are sensitive and responsive to salient environmental features, rich in value and meaning, presenting opportunities for action, commonly referred to as affordances ().
The concept of affordances rooted in ecological psychology, has evolved into an interdisciplinary framework (see ). Recent refinements include a relational perspective that considers the interaction between the agent’s abilities and environmental features (), and an experiential view conceiving affordances as a field of possibilities that become salient in a given context, shaped by objects, people, and situational dynamics (Van Dijk and Rietveld, 2016). Affordances specific to a particular situation or place (e.g., classrooms, street parades) contribute to the emergence of collectively generated higher-order relational structures, known as behavior settings1, which have specific spatial and temporal boundaries (). These structured patterns of coordinated behavior, tied to specific settings, invite and sustain individuals’ engagement. Active engagement with environmental features and tendencies to move or act in particular ways–both individually and collectively–are closely linked to how the agent’s environment affords specific actions and behaviors (; ; ; Djebbara et al., 2021) and affective states (; ; ). For instance, atmospheres are considered extra-individual phenomena that shape the salience of affordances () and invite an individual’s affective engagement. The perception of relevant (affective) affordances is an active process involving the appraisal of meaning-laden environmental cues. As [, p. 14] describe it, “[.]is a process of perceiving a value-rich ecological object”, a dynamic interplay of evaluation, adaptation, and sense-making. [, p. 188] further emphasizes the relational nature of the affordances, arguing that their value-laden properties are “realized in the anticipation of an action or the course of action”. Therefore, affordances are not static properties of the environment but emerge through an agent’s active interaction with their surroundings that occurs over time, shaping both behavior and affective experience.
Similarly, building on enactive and extended mind theories, Thompson and Stapleton (2009) argue that cognition is not confined to the brain or external structures but “is the relational process of sense-making that takes place between the system and its environment” (p. 4, emphasis added). The sense-making activity regulates our interactions with the world, transforming an otherwise meaningless physical reality into a “place of salience, meaning and value, an environment (Umwelt) in the proper biological sense of the term” (p. 25). In other words, cognition enables organisms to inhabit a world of significance. Crucially, this enactive perspective of sense-making implies that cognition is inherently affective. As [, p. 2) states, “one is affected when something merely strikes one as meaningful, relevant, or salient”. Affective states, therefore, are integral to how we engage with the world. They manifest as psychological tensions that push an agent either away from (negative valence) or towards (positive valence) particular aspects of the environment. This fundamental tendency to modify one’s relation with the environment () forms the basis for the concepts of affective scaffolding and affective niche (; ), which describe how individuals shape their environments to regulate and sustain affective experiences.
Taken together, these perspectives highlight that cognition is not only relational and affective but also temporally structured through the couplings between brain–body rhythms and the environments we inhabit. To advance this line of inquiry, it is necessary to explore how situated affectivity intersects with the dynamics of the sociomaterial environment. This perspective article brings together current research and theory aiming to deepen our understanding of this relationship and to catalyze new directions for research. The discussion is framed through the lens of dynamic systems approaches to cognition2 (Van Gelder, 1998; Thelen and Smith, 2006), which emphasize the dimension of temporality. The method combines ideas and findings from different fields, organized around rhythm and temporality. It draws attention to relational aspects that are often missed in stimulus-response models emphasizing the need to consider how processes unfold over time. The main contribution is to treat rhythm as a means of connecting brain, body, and environment, and to show how this view can guide future research and inclusive architectural design. The goal is to highlight overlooked aspects of affectivity and suggest new ways to study how agents and environments interact over time.
The discussion is organized into four sections. Section 2 explores and compares the notions of resonance, attunement, and entrainment, examining how dynamic coupling processes unfold between the agent and the sociomaterial environment. Section 3 foregrounds key aspects of situated affectivity by juxtaposing different perspectives on affective relationality, including affective affordances, affective scaffolding, affective arrangements, and atmospheres. Finally, Section 4 synthesizes the main contributions from the preceding sections, highlighting emerging themes and implications for research and design, and Section 5 concludes by summarizing key insights and suggesting directions for future investigation.
2 Shared brain-body-environmentrhythms
The synchronization of brain rhythms with body rhythms and environmental rhythms is often linked to the notions of resonance, attunement and entrainment. Entrainment and resonance, at the level of agent–environment interaction, can be seen as measurable dynamic processes between agent and environment, while attunement describes the experiential quality often connected with these dynamics.
Resonance is a core property of perceptual and neural systems functioning across multiple scales: from the bursting activity of single neurons (Izhikevich et al., 2003), through the spontaneous oscillatory dynamics of neuronal networks (Thompson and Varela, 2001; Varela, 1995), to the level of body–brain–environment coupling. In ecological psychology, the term relates to Gibson’s metaphor of a resonant brain, rooted in the idea that “ […] the perceptual system simply extracts the invariants from the flowing array; it resonates to the invariant structure or is attuned to it” (, p. 249, original emphasis). Building on this, Raja (2018) proposes an operational account of ecological resonance. He argues that “to explain resonance is to account for the coupling of the dynamic systems at the ecological and intra-organismic scales in terms of the ecological variable that constrains a given agent-environment interaction” (2018, p. 41). In this sense, ecological resonance refers to the informational coupling: the dynamics of agent-environment interaction are coupled to the agent’s central nervous system in terms of the same ecological information, which is revealed at the scale of behavior and specifies the available affordances.
While resonance captures a system’s sensitivity to structured information in the environment, attunement carries a more intentional connotation (Heft, 2001). Ryan and Gallagher argue that resonance is a more passive concept, whereas attunement involves a dynamic adjustment. For instance, during music improvisation, the musician “must be attuned and responsive to what has been played and is currently being played, just like someone walking down the street must be attuned and responsive to what is happening to the ground and around them” (Ryan and Gallagher, 2020, p. 11). Attunement thus embodies the sense of connection individuals experience–the qualitative aspect of self-tuning to environmental variables. It is the experiential quality of perceiving one’s actions, emotions, or thoughts as both influenced by, and exerting influence upon, elements of the surrounding world (, p. 7; Vara Sánchez, 2023, p. 61). As Vara Sánchez (2023) notes, one may perceive one’s movements as attuned to a song or to the rhythms of a city while walking, even in the absence of measurable entrainment. Nonetheless, the experience of attunement is closely linked to dynamic coupling processes and is, in many cases the experiential outcome of some degree of entrainment ().
Entrainment operates at multiple levels—physiological, behavioral, and social—and generally refers to the temporal alignment of oscillatory activity with an external rhythm. Lakatos, Gross, and Thut define entrainment more precisely as “the alignment of one or more oscillating systems to an external rhythm, whereby the interactions are unidirectional, that is, the external rhythm influences the oscillating system(s) but not vice versa” (2019, p. 890). This unidirectional aspect of entrainment is a key feature distinguishing entrainment from ecological resonance.
2.1 Empirical evidence on agent-environment couplings
Evidence of neural entrainment highlights the significant role of environmental features (Djebbara et al., 2022; ) in shaping these complex interactions. For example, research on neural entrainment has demonstrated phase-locked synchronization of neural oscillations in the visual cortex at an alpha frequency to the rhythmic frequency of an external flickering light. This synchronization often results in periodic fluctuations in visual perception, causing moments where vision appears sharper (; Spaak et al., 2014). Attention may also rhythmically modulate perception, producing cycles of heightened and reduced perceptual sensitivity (Papadopoulos et al., 2012; VanRullen, 2016; VanRullen, 2018). Sensing the world is, thus, an active process that leverages temporal regularities to anticipate future events across sensory modalities. A clear example of this cross-modal temporal anticipation is speech perception. During conversation, the visual input of a speaker’s lip movements provides crucial temporal cues for upcoming auditory inputs (Schroeder et al., 2008), facilitating speech comprehension. Interestingly, entrainment can occur in response to quasi-rhythmic patterns characterized by a successive build-up and release of tension, where each release prepares for the subsequent escalation.
These mechanisms indicate how perception is an active, temporally structured process that adapts to environmental rhythms. They highlight two central processes associated with theories of direct perception: active sensing (e.g., sniffing, eye movement, and saccades or micro saccades) and dynamic attending (; ). These processes involve actively detecting and then enhancing the sensing of behaviorally relevant environmental information (while suppressing irrelevant aspects), as well as preparing the system for forthcoming input flows through the generation of rhythmic expectations (Schroeder et al., 2010; VanRullen, 2016). The idea of active sensing is fundamental to the concept of direct perception and the notion of resonance in ecological psychology. Gibson notes that “ [t]he state of a perceptual system is altered when it is attuned to information of a certain sort. The system has become sensitized. Differences are noticed that were previously not noticed. Features become distinctive that were formerly vague” (, p. 249). Active detection of behaviorally relevant environmental information is facilitated by dynamic periodicities in visuospatial attention3, which are shaped both by extrinsic structural properties and by intrinsic factors such as intention, motivation, and affect ().
Embodied engagement with architectural and spatial rhythms, perceived dynamically through movement, can scaffold experiences of attunement between an agent and their surroundings, reinforcing the view that perception is an active, temporally structured process. The inherent temporal regularities in the environment help predict and anticipate upcoming sensory events, thus optimizing behavioral performance (Cravo et al., 2013; Spaak et al., 2014). Moreover, the perception of such structures is not only modulated by movement but can also reciprocally constrain movement, as demonstrated in cases of sensorimotor coupling (; Djebbara et al., 2021). This suggests the possibility of natural attunement (see ) with continuous environmental stimulation, such as, for example, the rate of change of visual features in the optic flow. For instance, Leonards et al. (2015) demonstrated that the directional pattern of the floor tiles can subtly alter walking trajectories, causing individuals to veer from a straight path. Similarly, found that the perceived rate of change of vertical stripe patterns influenced walking speed: when the space between stripes was reduced–creating the visual impression of rapid motion–participants walked more slowly. A real-world application of this phenomenon can be seen in traffic safety interventions. Thaler and Sunstein (2021) reported that decreasing the spacing between white road stripes along Lake Michigan’s east coast led to a reduction in driving speed, demonstrating how environmental rhythms and affordances can be intentionally designed to guide behavior.
2.2 Becoming attuned to extra-individual relational structures
These behavioral effects suggests that environmental (built) structures may engender a sense of attunement through movement and spatial interaction. For example, the behavior setting and atmosphere of a museum, as illustrated in Figure 1, can be conceptualized as a ‘bundle of different rhythms’, of fluctuations of environmental information, modulating coupling processes between body-brain rhythms and the sociomaterial environment. Perceptual systems—comprising the sensory organs, the motor system, the nervous system, and their coordinated activity—can couple with the perceptual information contained in environmental energy flows, such as light or vibrating air. Such information specifies the available affordances, and the agent’s responsiveness to the relevant affordances is closely linked to the behavior level of analysis ().
FIGURE 1
Phenomenological perspectives4 informed by ecological psychology and enactivism suggest that the detection of relevant affordances gives rise to an embodied readiness for action—a pre-reflective phenomenon felt corporeally, which links the phenomenological to the behavioral scale of analysis (; ; ). As Rietveld, Denys and Van Westen claim, “the experienced invitation of an affordance […] can be measured (and analyzed) as a state of ‘action readiness’ in emotion psychology and (affective) neuroscience” (2018, p. 3). These states of action readiness “originate in fluctuations of affect” that orient individuals towards affordances that matter to them (, p. 2859).
Behavior settings such as museums, restaurants or contemplative places exhibit stability over longer periods, forming patterns of action readiness associated with the slower dynamics of sociomaterial practices. These patterns of action readiness “can enslave or entrain faster affordance-related states of action readiness” (, p. 22), thereby pre-structuring which states of readiness are likely to be adopted. To accommodate what the individual cares about in the particular situation—shaped by personal dispositions and the atmosphere of the setting—multiple affordance-related states of readiness interact and self-organize to generate coordinated engagement with the world (; ). For example, the behavior setting of a contemplative place may invite general patterns of readiness for quiet, slow actions (e.g., speaking softly), but distinct affective dispositions differentiate responses and the experience of attunement with the atmosphere of the place: tourists are more likely to explore and observe the architecture and ornamentation of a temple, while devotees may remain seated in quiet contemplation and prayer. As Rietveld Denys VanWesten remark: “[s]tates of action readiness characterize affective states in ways that reflect the strivings of organisms to modify its relation to the environment […] Relevant affordances move us, affect and solicit us as they get us ready to act […] Affective tension and action readiness are two sides of the same coin” (2018, p. 14)
3 Different perspectives associated with situated affectivity
conceptualized emotions as forms of skillful engagement with the world, emphasizing their environmental embeddedness and shaping the notion of situated affectivity. Building on this, several related concepts, including affective affordances (), affective arrangements (Slaby et al., 2019) and affective scaffolding (; ), have emerged, deepening our understanding of situated affectivity. Furthermore, they contribute to the study of atmospheres, which has sparked interdisciplinary discussions across cultural studies, phenomenology, and architectural theory (e.g., ; Schmitz et al., 2011; ; ; ; ; Velasco and Niikawa, 2025).
The concept of affective affordance refers to the perception of environmental features “as affording regulative opportunities to amplify, suppress, extend, enrich, and explore the phenomenal and temporal character of our affective experiences” (, p. 214). A straightforward example is the affective transformation induced by different sensory qualities of natural light and darkness. However, the ability to detect and resonate with affective affordances is significantly shaped by an agent’s habits, affective state and history of interactions with elements of their environment. Furthermore, the configuration between the different environmental elements plays a crucial role in regulating affective experience.
The idea that human affectivity is shaped and supported by external structures and environmental resources in a much broader sense, including things, spaces, activities, and other people, is linked to the notion of affective scaffolding (; ). The term describes how the physical and social environment provides mediating structures that enable cognitive and affective processes to extend beyond the organism. (). In this sense, sense-making and affectivity are not confined to internal states but are dynamically co-regulated by external resources. The ability to regulate affective states by actively modifying one’s environment is linked to the concept of niche construction, which Gibson (1979/1986, p. 128) defines as referring “more to how an animal lives than to where it lives. … The niche implies a kind of animal, and the animal implies a kind of niche”. In this view, affective niche construction involves material elements, practices, social groups, and cultural structures that shape and organize our affective life.
The heterogeneous ensembles encompassing “persons, things, artifacts, spaces, discourses, behaviors, and expressions in a characteristic mode of composition and dynamic relatedness” are what Slaby et al. (2019) refer to as affective arrangements. This term captures the affective interconnectedness within a given sociomaterial setting, including the affective interactions between an agent and elements of their environment. Much like behavior settings, which emerge through coordinated actions, affective arrangements (found at workplaces, sports stadiums, and ceremonies) bring multiple agents “into social alignment with one another” (), structuring their orientation within a material context - what to do, how, and when. This results in what [Slaby et al. (2019), p. 5] described as “a dynamic, orchestrated conjunction”, where affective experience is shaped through collective participation in a shared environment.
Affective arrangements encompass broad affective dynamics, similar to the holistic and affective qualities of atmospheres. However, Slaby et al. (2019) observe that this dynamic quality of locally arranged affect can only be adequately described in specific situations in terms of atmospheres5. Conversely, employs the concept of affective arrangements as a tool to analyze how atmospheres animate and regulate actions at both individual and collective levels. For Krueger, affective arrangements are types of atmospheres: they carry an overall unifying feel or affective tonality, and they actively shape the possibilities for emotional experience, behavior, and social connection that may be present or absent in particular locales. Approaching atmospheres through the lens of affective arrangements emphasizes their capacity to influence dynamics of belonging—how they support different bodies in finding a sense of connection with the part of the world defined by these arrangements, and how they scaffold the development of “different habits, practices, and forms of self-experience” (). Furthermore, the concept of affective scaffolding, including notion of affective affordances (i.e., how environmental features invite actions related to emotion regulation), suggests that atmospheres can be understood as part of our scaffolding practices oriented toward the affective dimensions of daily life. According to , atmospheres can also be seen as part of the affective niches that we construct to regulate affective experience by modulating the affective salience of specific networks of affordances.
Phenomenological accounts on affective atmospheres suggest that they exist as a spatial-like state of the world and as an affective tonality resonating in the pericorporeal space of the feeling-body, that is, an experience “felt in the region of,” but not identical to one’s body (Schmitz et al., 2011, p. 245; ). While affect is concerned with “a body’s relation to the world or a relating of two evolving bodies to each other”, – atmospheres, as relational and dynamic phenomena, extend beyond the individuals. They encompass the “meshwork of all bodies (and worlds) in a shared situation” (, p. 269), showing how affective experience is not only embodied but also spatially and socially distributed. Ben Anderson notes that affective atmospheres are a class of experience that lies in-between subject/object distinctions, arguing that as collective affects they provide a “shared ground from which subjective states and their attendant feelings and emotions emerge” (2009, p. 78) in ways that modulate how we inhabit specific situations; thus, the relationship between affectivity and atmosphere cannot be reduced to the mere experience of a potential feeling.
From an ecological–enactive perspective, affective atmospheres shape embodied, pre-reflective responsiveness to relevant affordances that invite action (; Velasco and Niikawa, 2025). argues that they enable a shift from the background of the landscape of affordances (; Van Dijk and Rietveld, 2016) —all potential actions available to a given form of life6 — toward the lived experience of the field of affordances, that is, the specific possibilities for action to which an individual is responsive in a given situation. By affectively framing the situation, affective atmospheres make certain affordances stand out as more salient than others. From this perspective, atmospheres can be understood as high-level, nested relations of agent-environment joint potentialities, which are grasped corporeally and affectively (Velasco and Niikawa, 2025).
4 Emerging themes
The scholarship on situated affectivity and atmospheres, together with empirical and theoretical work on dynamic agent–environment interactions, foregrounds the relational structures (e.g., affordances, behavior settings) that shape our attunement to environmental features, individually and collectively. Building on the preceding discussions of resonance, attunement, entrainment, and affective relationality, this section synthesizes insights from current scholarship to highlight how cognition is both relational and temporally structured through brain–body–environment couplings. It emphasizes the need to move beyond static accounts of architecture and reconsider the temporal unfolding of architectural experience, an often-overlooked dimension in (neuro)architectural research and design. In doing so, the section introduces conceptual vocabularies that capture change over time and considers how such approaches can inform inclusive practices, particularly in relation to (neuro)diversity. The themes that emerge from approaching situated affectivity through the perspective of a moving, intentional body rather than a fixed observer point toward new directions for future research and design.
4.1 A process-oriented and relational approach to situated affectivity
Various situated perspectives of affectivity emphasize a primordial affective registering of relations (; ), understood as a concrete, direct perceptual grasp similar to affordances. For example, affective arrangements can be seen as “prepared occasions for affective engagement, for absorption and attunement” (Slaby, 2019, p. 275). Similarly, atmospheres have been described as “ecological invites or meanings” (, p. 46), environment-agent joint potentialities (Velasco and Niikawa, 2025) and fields of potential where specific actions “bubble up”, becoming more salient, conditioned, or induced (). Atmospheres, thus, modulate “the whole landscape of affordances and the felt body that resonates with it, settling the background from where concrete and relevant affordances may emerge” (, p. 17).
This relational and process-oriented dimension of affectivity is also highlighted in approach to atmospheres. He describes them as collections of events, “[m]ovements of particles, bodies, and rays, billows of winds and shifts and shafts of light, reflections and sounds, echoes and contrasts, overshadowing, all coming together in a singular feeling”. Notably, he notes that this is not merely a simple aggregate but “a coming-together in reciprocal activity” (, p. 204). A closer look at resonance, through the example of an echo, reveals the two-way movement inherent in atmospheric feeling. As explains, “[resonation] fills the emptiness with its complex patterning … The bouncing back and forth multiplies the sound’s movement without cutting it …This complex self-continuity is a putting into relation of the movement to itself: self-relation”. He argues that the best term for this “complicating immediacy of self-relation is [ pp. 13–14]. These intensities generate a particular affect within the individual, where the atmospheric feeling of the affective tone coincides with the transmission of a dynamic form, a pattern of activity (, pp. 194–196).
Taken together, these accounts of atmospheres, resonance, and intensity foreground affectivity as a dynamic, processual phenomenon rather than a static property of environments or individuals. The conceptualization of atmospheres as a collection of events that come together in reciprocal activity and as a field of joint potentialities between the individual and the environment serves as a stepping stone towards understanding affect as a process. Extending current critiques that challenge traditional static view of architectural experience (), this perspective of affectivity draws attention to its temporal unfolding, opening pathways toward a more process-oriented understanding of the affective experience of architectural space.
4.2 Exploring affectivity through the orchestration of brain-body-environment rhythms
The dynamic embodied experience of being affectively “gripped” by an atmosphere is, according to Slaby (2014), a form of “phenomenal coupling” with structures or processes in one’s environment that itself has dynamic phenomenal characteristics. This interaction between environmental dynamics and the active feeling body becomes manifest as “an arena of significant opportunities” for embodied engagement with the world. It is experience as “felt bodily potentialities” through which the environment is apprehended (Slaby, 2014). Interoceptive sensations shaped by prior experience and the visceral body rhythms of organs, muscles, and joints inform our ongoing engagement with the world. These bodily-affective changes are integrated with current exteroceptive multisensory information to improve the estimation of expected uncertainty through a future-oriented anticipatory mechanism ().
The metaphor of the felt body as “a sounding board for spatially ‘poured out’ atmospheres” (Slaby, 2019, p. 278) suggests a process of bodily resonance between internal and external rhythms. According to Vara Sanchez, the idea of bodily resonance is often associated with the phenomenological notion of the feeling-body rather than the physical body, highlighting a relatively passive view of the body. Building on empirical evidence on how visceral shape brain dynamics and cognition (see ), Vara Sanchez argues that “role of the body in the embodiment of emotions, thus, is not only sending interoceptive information to the brain […] or bodily resonance; it plays, as well, an active part on the rhythm that enacts along brain oscillations (Vara Sánchez, 2019, p. 725). Rhythm, beyond mere repetition, can be conceptualized more broadly as flow or form (, p. 287)7 or as “an evolving pattern of oscillations able to entrain other oscillations” (Vara Sánchez, 2020, p. 88). Such enactivist and dynamic views of affectivity (; Vara Sánchez, 2019) highlight the importance of focusing on the enacted rhythms and the rhythmic interactions between the body-brain-environment system.
There are different qualities of rhythm we can experience in the built environment, often linked to a tension between oppositions (Vara Sánchez, 2023). Various rhythmic phenomena–marked by alternations between difference/repetition, tension/release, expected/unexpected, and movement/stillness–shape the overall atmospheric rhythm to which individuals can become attuned. They create environmental structures with temporal regularities that perceptual systems can flexibly use, even across sensory modalities, to support attunement and the anticipation of upcoming events.
Actively engaging with the affective dynamics of environmental structures or processes that manifest expressive qualities (Slaby, 2014) —such as theatrical performance, music concerts, or affective atmospheres (e.g., a crowd of protestors chanting rhythmically)—can modulate bodily rhythms. Recent studies measuring physiological signals (cardiac and respiratory activity, skin conductance responses) in audiences at classical music concerts provide evidence of synchronization across individuals (Tschacher et al., 2023; Tschacher et al., 2024a). The findings suggest that synchronized embodied experiences were linked not only to personality traits but also to the emotional and aesthetic quality of the experience. Moreover, participants’ “listening mode” had a measurable impact on synchrony: listeners who reported being attuned to the auditory vibrations of music—including its structure, melodies, rhythms, and instrumental timbres—showed greater synchronization compared to those who reported being distracted or listening only “with half an ear” (Tschacher et al., 2024b). Haptic vibration can also increase the intensity of emotional experiences, heightening, for instance, the sensation of fear when watching a horror movie ().
In summary, these accounts highlight how bodily rhythms (which can modulate brain rhythms) interweave with environmental structures to generate dynamic fields of attunement. Evidence of collective synchronization in musical and performative contexts further illustrates how atmospheric rhythms extend beyond the individual, shaping shared affective experiences that unfold over time. Rhythms also play a key role in architecturally arranged situations, where they function as mediating structures that underpin sense-making and affectivity through agent-environment couplings. Architectural form itself can act as a patterning force that modulates rhythms (Robinson, 2021b, p. 1), shaping how affective experience unfolds. Current work on situated affectivity suggests that the notion of “affective arrangement” provides a valuable tool for examining this relationality, enabling researchers to trace how local constellations of elements dynamically interact and contribute over time to complex, orchestrated formations. This perspective highlights rhythm as a central aspect of situated affectivity, revealing how temporal regularities and oscillatory patterns organize embodied engagement with the world.
4.3 Conceptual vocabularies that capture changes over time
Conceptual vocabularies that capture changes over time such as rhythms, vibrations, and tonality can help explain how different local constellations of elements and energy patterns influence the overall affective atmosphere and the individual’s experience within it. Vibration and tone are two relevant phenomenological concepts capturing how we attune to environmental features (). For example, the vibrations associated with urban tactile paving encourage visually impaired individuals to attune to auditory-haptic rhythms, guiding their movement through the city. Vibration, as defined by , is a “unit of sense crossing human and non-human boundaries” and can be approached both qualitatively (as felt experiences of intensity) and quantitatively (in terms of frequency, amplitude, phase, damping, and periodicity). Conversely, tone refers to how vibrations are organized with specific sensory effects in mind, shaping different tendencies and degrees of attunement.
Furthermore, the concept of vibration shifts the focus to environmental elements that function as thresholds, influencing an object’s or body’s capacity to act (). A striking example is the Urban Carpet installation in Aarhus, which explores the relationship between affordances and atmosphere. This installation, as illustrated in Figure 2, is a woven textile of charred wood placed at a crossroad, which draws attention to the unexpected sensory experiences of touch and smell. Altering the texture and olfactory qualities of the space changes pedestrians’ walking pace, stimulating spontaneous actions such as foot tapping and dancing (). This installation has been discussed in relation to the effects of the perceived resistance and the associated haptic feeling () as well as in terms of its contribution to placemaking as a result of the experience of its sensual effects ().
FIGURE 2
Moving towards a more process-oriented perspective we focus here on the shift of the multisensory experience and how it relates to the phenomenon of metastable attunement, a term from dynamic systems theory that captures the flexible balance between stability and openness to novelty in agent–environment coupling (). Metastable attunement refers to the ability to maintain a dynamic, responsive state that enable flexible switching between different modes of skillful engagement with the environment such as switching from exploiting already familiar action possibilities to experimenting with novel ones in response to situational demands (). By becoming attuned to environmental dynamics, the body-brain system helps anticipate and prioritize actions that will minimize uncertainty. From an ecological-enactive perspective, this active inference8 is associated with the tendency towards an optimal grip on a particular situation, or more precisely, a tendency towards an optimal metastable attunement to the dynamics of the environment (; ). This reflects a readiness to switch between behavioral patterns in response to environmental demands and the individual’s needs. The function of the Urban Carpet as a threshold illustrates well how metastable attunement enables context-sensitive, selective openness towards anticipating new forms of interaction with the environment, such as foot tapping and dancing. The subtle variations in vibration that arise when walking on the charred wood invite different states of action-readiness, which generate new action tendencies and facilitate a switch into new behavioural patterns.
In addition to the Urban Carpet example, the Reversible Destiny Lofts of Arakawa and Gins, as illustrated in Figure 3, offer a complementary architectural case potentially associated with metastable attunement. The design of these lofts is strongly linked to their concept of “architectural body” as a relational field () between the proper body of the organism and environment—constantly being recalibrated through sensory engagement. In particular, by introducing shifts in the sensory experience though chromatic contrast, textures, uneven floors and slopes they destabilize habitual ways of engaging with a domestic environment, compelling inhabitants to actively re-attune and change their behavioral patterns and actions. As argued by this sensitivity to novel situations and the sensitivity to a multiplicity of action possibilities is linked to the property of metastable attunement.
FIGURE 3
Anticipating an affordance within a specific context generates an action-readiness pattern. As note, this makes the affordance stand out as relevant. The relevance of locally available affordances is felt corporeally in the skilled body as states of affordance-related action readiness that are simultaneously affective and behavioral (). Considering the different dynamics and relational structures that emerge between the brain, body and the architecturally arranged surroundings offers a promising approach that can advance design practice. Conceptual vocabularies, such as rhythms and vibrations, “capture” the energy patterns in the built environment including fluctuations in sound, light, and temperature that vary over time or in response to movement and play a key role in rethinking the temporal dimension of architectural experience.
4.4 Advancing research and design for (neuro) diversity
The agent’s selective openness to the available affordances depends on dynamical patterns that unfold across multiple timescales. Slower-evolving dynamics, such as sociocultural practices, constrain the faster-evolving dynamics that shape the process of attunement to the current context (; Velasco, 2025). Consequently, abilities acquired through a history of engagement in sociocultural practices () shape how an individual perceives, responds to, and attunes to the actions that a particular situation affords. Differences in prior experience, bodily skills, personal tendencies, affective dispositions and broader social, cultural and gender dynamics influence responsiveness to higher-order networks of affordances while atmospheres (similar to behavior settings) “shape the potentiality of what is to be felt, perceived or acted on” (, p. 18). These differences may cause specific individuals to feel disoriented or excluded in particular environments. argues that an inability to tune into the affective arrangement of a setting may create a form of affective dissonance at a pre-reflective level, similar to the discomfort caused by spatial disorientation (; ). This suggests that some atmospheres, for example, might be more inclusive than others in promoting social interconnectedness and shared experiences. For example, a neurodivergent individual may experience difficulties tuning-in and orienting in environments that are noisy or brightly lit. In contrast, adjustable lighting or variability in lighting conditions in public spaces may reduce the possibility of sensory overload and emotional distress. Designing for (neuro)diversity requires recognizing how specific settings may not be adequately configured to accommodate different styles of “bodily being-in-the-world”, thereby limiting possibilities for social connection, attunement and the feeling of “being at home” (, p. 127).
The feeling of “being at home” is scaffolded synchronically by the immediate material and sensory context one engages with and diachronically by the social, cultural, and material practices that shape one’s lived experiences. Through these practices, individuals develop confidence in their relationship with the environment and an “affective trust” in the reliability of specific environmental resources serving as affective scaffolding (). This trust contributes to a more general attitude of certainty or “basic trust” in the surrounding world, supporting unreflective, habitual actions ().
However, when this fundamental trust is disrupted (due to persistent stress, cultural displacement or psychopathological conditions), it can result in a diminished sense of bodily resonance with the world, ultimately restricting access to affective regulation (; ). Given this, it is crucial to conceptualize urban environments as constellations of affective niches, of public places (e.g., streets, canals, rivers, seaside areas, squares, parks, and contemplative places) as healing hubs offering affective affordances that support emotional regulation and well-being.
5 Conclusion
The dynamic approach to cognition offers conceptual tools that can advance both empirical research on agent–environment relations and architectural design research. Rhythm emerges as a central unit of analysis within these lines of inquiry, linking brain, body, and environment. Bringing into dialogue non-representational notions such as resonance, entrainment, attunement, affectivity, and atmospheres enables deeper exploration of shared rhythms and natural attunement () as integral aspects of affective experience at the individual and collective level. Complementing arguments that emphasize the temporal dimension of architecture (e.g., ) this conceptual synthesis highlights the need for a relational and process-oriented perspective, challenging static stimulus–response models.
Conceptual vocabularies that capture change over time, such as rhythm, vibration, and tonality, provide valuable tools for design, enabling the study of the affective dimension of architectural experience and how it unfolds dynamically over time. They also support the development of research on dynamic phenomena such as metastable attunement, in which transient disequilibrium in agent–environment coupling is experienced as affective tension and resolved by engaging with relevant affordances (). Crucially, the selective openness to the available affordances and the related action-readiness patterns are shaped by experiential priors, which are inherently link to individual, social and cultural dynamics. Therefore, future research on the relationship between the built environment and situated affectivity should take into account such differences that influence the experiential quality of attunement between internal dynamics and environmental rhythms. Examples of this line of inquiry include exploring how different individual, social and cultural factors shape differential attunement to affective affordances and atmospheres in architectural environments or how gender differences influence attunement to urban rhythms. Attention to diversity across gender, culture, and social contexts can not only advance scientific knowledge but also inform the design of more inclusive spaces that embrace diversity. By foregrounding temporality and rhythmic interaction, the emerging themes call for new methodological approaches capable of capturing the situated, embodied, and affective mind in its ongoing engagement with the dynamics of the physical, social and cultural environments.
Statements
Data availability statement
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.
Author contributions
EC: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft. GS: Writing – review and editing. TCP: Writing – review and editing.
Funding
The author(s) declared that financial support was received for this work and/or its publication. This publication is based on research conducted as part of a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon, 2020 Research and Innovation Program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 101034403. T. C. Papadopoulos received funding for this project, while E. Charalambous was awarded a fellowship. The content of this paper reflects solely the authors’ views, and the Research Executive Agency bears no responsibility for any use of the information contained herein.
Acknowledgments
The auhors are also grateful to the reviewers for their insightful comments and constructive suggestions, which significantly improved the quality of this work. They want to express our sincere gratitude to Zakaria Djebbara for his insightful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper.
Conflict of interest
The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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Footnotes
1.^The notion was first coined by Barker (1986) who observed that the behavior of different children in the same setting had less variability than the behavior of a single child across settings.
2.^The ‘dynamic hypothesis’ challenges current information-processing understandings of cognition and the conceptual toolkit associated with the brain-computer metaphor. This approach emphasizes the idea of cognition as “the simultaneously, mutually influencing unfolding of complex temporal structures” (Van Gelder, 1998, p. 621).
3.^It involves continuous alternations between exploration–scanning the environment for relevant information–and exploitation–focusing on specific elements with behavioral significance or perceptual salience ().
4.^We refer here to the Skilled Intentionality Framework developed in ecological psychology by Rietveld and colleagues (; Van Dijk and Rietveld, 2016; ).
5.^The source of their hesitation regarding the use of the term “atmosphere” is not clearly articulated. It may stem from their observation that the local set-ups of affective arrangement, such as teamwork arrangements in corporate offices, can establish affective relations that extend beyond the specific location of the workplace and working hours “by means of full-time connectivity” (Slaby et al., 2019).
6.^The term is used by to capture the variety of practices within the human way of life.
7.^Benveniste offers a nuanced interpretation of the term rhythm (ρυθμός; rythmos), describing it as a distinctive form—the characteristic arrangement of parts within a whole. This concept implies a perceivable structure that is not fixed but subject to change, “a temporary disposition of something flowing.” Within the framework of atomist philosophy, Benveniste notes that such particular configurations of movement or flow are referred to as fluctuation.
8.^This is an alternative interpretation of Finston’s theory of the anticipating brain (). It offers a perspective of free-energy principle (reduction of uncertainty or prediction error) as a tendency to reduce the degree of disattunement between internal dynamics and environmental dynamics by rabidly accommodating small deviations from the organism’s anticipation through skillful engagement with the environment (). The enactive view on predictive processing (predictive engagement) highlights active inference as being more a matter of action than inference “a doing, an enactive adjustment, a worldly engagement—with anticipatory and corrective aspects already included” in which “the brain, as part of and along with the larger organism, actively responds in ways that allow for the right kind of ongoing attunement with the environment–an environment that is physical but also social and cultural” (, p. 2634).
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Summary
Keywords
situated affectivity, affective scaffolding, attunement, environmental rhythms, resonance, enactive cognition, atmospheres, architectural experience
Citation
Charalambous E, Spanoudis G and Papadopoulos TC (2026) On situated affectivity and the orchestration of brain-body-environment rhythms. Front. Built Environ. 11:1602783. doi: 10.3389/fbuil.2025.1602783
Received
30 March 2025
Revised
23 November 2025
Accepted
10 December 2025
Published
07 January 2026
Volume
11 - 2025
Edited by
Pier Luigi Sacco, University of Studies G d’Annunzio Chieti and Pescara, Italy
Reviewed by
Carlos Vara Sánchez, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
Updates
Copyright
© 2026 Charalambous, Spanoudis and Papadopoulos.
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) and the copyright owner(s) 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: Efrosini Charalambous, charalambous.efrosini@ucy.ac.cy
Disclaimer
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