Abstract

This paper presents a historical perspective on the origin of the enactive approach to cognitive science, starting chronologically from cybernetics, with the aim of clarifying its main concepts, such as enaction, autopoiesis, structural coupling and natural drift; thus showing their influences in computational approaches and models of cognitive architecture. Works of renowned authors, as well as some of their main commentators, were addressed to report the development of enactive approach. We indicate that the enactive approach transcends its original context within biology, and at a second moment within connectionism, changes the understanding of the relationships so far established between the body and the environment, and the ideas of conceptual relationships between the mind and the body. The influence on computational theories is of great importance, leading to new artificial intelligence systems as well as the proposition of complex, autopoietic and alive machines. Finally, the article stresses the importance of the enactive approach in the design of agents, understanding that previous approaches have very different cognitive architectures and that a prototypical model of enactive cognitive architecture is one of the largest challenges today.