An enactivist approach to HCI: Bridging the gap between agent autonomy and affordances - HCI International 2025 Proceedings
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In this talk, I presented my paper “An enactivist approach to HCI: Bridging the gap between agent autonomy and affordances”, which advances draws from the Enactivist theory of cogntion to reoperationalize the “sense of agency” variable in HCI into “feelings of agency” as a neurophenomenological variable. The decomposes feelings of agency into two subconstructs: (a) affective engagement, measured neurodynamically through Frontal Alpha asymmetry and alpha-beta ratio, and (b) volitional attention, measured neurodynamically through cross-frequency coupling in the anterior cingulate cortext (ACC) and orbitofrontal cortext (OFC). The talk proposes that this reoperatioanlization is a better measure of how emerging HCI modalities affect personal agency and advances three design principles: (i) Engagement-Disengagement Modulation, (ii) Affordance Gradation, and (iii) expressive and authorial interfaces.