AUTHOR=Stankozi Caroline TITLE=Imagination, ecologized and enacted: driven by the historicity of affordance competition JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=Volume 15 - 2024 YEAR=2024 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1369820 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1369820 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=

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 non-representational interpretation thereof. They are used to explain: (iii) What affords imagining? After discussing both van Dijk and Rietveld’s in 2020 non-representational answer and McClelland’s in 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.