Enactive interactions and embodied knowledge acquisition in natural and virtual environments: implications for cognitive neuroscience

Within the most recent cognitive neuroscience approach, enaction considers human interaction as situated in a specific context. The sensorimotor coupling of biological organisms and the environment in which they live determines recurrent patterns of perception and action that shapes cognition. At the same time embodied knowledge refers to the idea of a body as the interface between the brain and the world that allows the mind and the specific surrounding environment to merge in order to acquire knowledge. By reshaping the concept of perception, action and learning the enactive approach sheds new light on the implications that mirror neurons discoveries had for neuroscience in the last twenty years. On the other side, enactive embodied cognition introduces the notion of the coevolution of the agent and its environment opening several unrevealed questions about the equivalence between natural and simulated environments largely used in cognitive research and clinical applications. The present contribution aims in detail those questions and in finding possible answers by presenting some example of knowledge acquisition assessment and treatment through the use of virtual simulation in cognitive neuroscience.