Neuroecological Approaches to Action-Perception

Perceiving is rarely the work of a motionless observer studying a fixed scene. In everyday life, organisms move - sampling and performing - and what is perceived is shaped by what bodies and environments afford. This idea lies at the center of the concept of affordances: organisms perceive the action possibilities their surroundings offer, and they do so through a continuous action-perception loop rather than a one-way, feed-forward flow from stimulus to response. Understanding this loop necessitates integrating contributions from brains, bodies, and environments - that is to say, a neuroecological perspective. Accordingly, a complete science of perception sits at the meeting point of several areas such as psychophysics, predictive coding, ecological psychology, embodied and dynamical accounts of sensation and cognition, and the neuroscience of active, naturalistic sensing.

This Research Topic aims to bring these areas together, welcoming contributions that examine how perception is inseparable from action and from the environment in which it unfolds. Doing so will advance computational, mechanistic, and theoretical understanding of how perceivers detect and use various forms of information to guide behavior. This collection is especially interested in work that moves beyond traditional laboratory settings toward naturalistic, real-world, or freely-behaving conditions across human and non-human animals, and across various computational and formal models.

This Research Topic welcomes computational, empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions addressing themes including, but not limited to:

• Affordance perception: how a perceiver detects action possibilities - such as graspability, pass-through-ability, reachability, and so on - and the calibration of affordances to bodily and environmental scales.

• Action-perception loop and active sensing: how movement, posture, and self-generated sampling shape perceptual information, including arm posture, postural control, and balance, considered as perceptual rather than purely motor problems.

• Ecological and embodied accounts of perception: perceptual information, resonance, invariants, and the dynamical-systems modelling of organism-environment coupling.

• Multisensory and contextual contributions to perceiving in natural settings: for example, auditory scene analysis under real-world conditions, and the role of context and prediction (e.g., predictive coding) during goal-directed perceiving.

• Neural and behavioral bases of naturalistic perception: studies of freely moving humans and animals, neuroethological approaches, and the perceptual underpinnings of decision making.

• Bodily perceiving of the self in space: body image and the perceived layout of the environment relative to the acting body, where these are grounded in sensory cognition.

• Theoretical and philosophical foundations: computational and conceptual work on affordances, ecological information, and the scope and integration of the sciences of perception, brain, body, and environment.

• Reanalysis and reinterpretation of existing results: a vast amount of experimental data is already available for reassessment from a neuroecological perspective, as well as from other theoretical lenses: including predictive processing, ecological psychology, embodied cognition, and dynamical systems approaches.

This collection welcomes a range of article types including, Original Research, Reviews, Mini-Reviews, Hypothesis & Theory, Perspective, Methods, and Brief Research Report articles. By assembling complementary perspectives from ecological and embodied theory to naturalistic neuroscience and psychophysics, this collection seeks to clarify how perceiving and acting are bound together, and to set out productive directions for an integrated, ecologically grounded perception science - or, a neuroecological approach to action-perception.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Registered Report
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Affordances, Ecological Cognition, Perception Science, Active Sensing, Perceptual Information, Multisensory Perception, Action-Perception loops, Contextual Perception

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.