Tools and peripersonal space: an enactive account of bodily space

Abstract Peripersonal space (PPS) is frequently defined as a plastic, pragmatic and goal-directed multisensory buffer that connects the brain-body with its immediate environment. While such characterisations indicate peripersonal spatiality profoundly embodied enactive, comparatively few attempts have aimed to systematically synthesise PPS literature compatible phenomenological accounts of lived provided by Heidegger Merleau-Ponty. Moreover, in traditional cognitive neuroscience, neurophysiological activity thought map onto discrete ‘cognitive correlates’. In contemporary 4E approaches cognition, however, phenomenology-derived notions ‘pre-reflective cognition’ ‘motor-intentionality’ appear, yet their neural correlates may be difficult pin down. Pre-reflectively, agents seemingly do not thematise spatial properties operationalised key experimental paradigms (e.g., rotation tasks) but are instead inherently spatially embedded within world. To refine this distinction, I survey how tools co-determine distinctly ‘world-embeddedness’ using neurophenomenological methodology (Varela, Journal Consciousness Studies, 3 (4), 330–349, 1996). Specifically, conduct two analyses tool-perception tool-use, examining both distance modulates affordance-perception tool-use remaps bodily via withdrawal from intentional-objects into co-constituting motor-intentionality itself. conclude briefly distinguishing interpretation cognition cognitivist frameworks. Thereafter, highlight temporal scaffolding underlying while conceptually grounding my account Embodied Simulation Theory (Gallese, Reti, Saperi, Linguaggi , (1), 31–46, 2018). What at stake thus an explicitly embodied-enactive qualitative situational quantitative positional, well viable, interdisciplinary strategy for unifying pre-reflective data.