Embodied Cognition is a Matter of Grip: Humanistic Cognitive Science and the Phenomenology of Attunement

Introduction

We might be inclined to say that having a mind involves the capacity to think, to reason, to plan, and to solve problems. Indeed, this view found its clearest expression during the mid-20th century in what became known as the cognitive revolution—a period that defined cognition in terms of symbolic activity (Newell & Simon, 1972; Varela et al., 1991). To think, in this context, was to accurately represent the world in a way that enabled successful problem-solving or effective navigation of one’s physical environment (see Dreyfus, 2016; Varela et al., 1991).

In the early years, research and engineering breakthroughs—driven by this very idea—led to the development of machines that could so effortlessly outperform even the most expert human minds in computationally heavy tasks that it was almost laughable. ¹ Yet proponents of the classical view failed to anticipate two crucial facts in their endeavors to explain and mechanize cognition. The first was that it is much more difficult to design a machine that can handle an egg without breaking it than it is to build one that can beat world chess champions. ² And the second, that it is much more difficult to design a machine that can learn to autonomously perceive the world than to design one that can compute abstract information about prespecified worldly objects.

I take these two facts as my departure point in this article precisely because of their paradoxical nature. Why has it taken longer to understand, let alone engineer machines that can meaningfully perceive and move about in the real world than ones that can compute symbolic information at superhuman speeds? Should not the latter have been the more challenging of the two feats? Indeed, these two facts shake our deeply held assumptions about what it really means to have a mind, foregrounding instead the question of the body and of perception in any genuine attempt at a science of cognition.

In this article, I seek to demonstrate the centrality and significance of embodied perception in the sphere of human cognitive life. My hope is to clarify, to the degree that is possible, that it is not symbolic (propositional), but rather bodily (procedural, perspectival, and participatory) activity that grounds cognition (Jaeger et al., 2024; Noë, 2009; Thompson, 2007; Varela et al., 1991; Vervaeke & Mastropietro, 2024). Specifically, I aim to advance an account of the mind not as a computer but as a form of grip over the world of perception, highlighting the embodied, situated, and perspectival nature of human cognitive agency (Dreyfus, 2016; Hovhannisyan & Vervaeke, 2022; Kiverstein et al., 2019; Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2014, 1948/2004).

I build my case in four steps. First, I set the stage with a historical-philosophical overview of the phenomenological tradition, which grounds the notion of optimal gripping—the guiding theme of this article—underscoring the promise of phenomenology as an antidote to the problems of philosophical modernity (i.e. rationalism vs. empiricism, reductionism vs. dualism). I then proceed to the second step, where I detail some of the core tenets of phenomenological philosophy, focusing particularly on the phenomenological and transcendental reductions articulated in Husserlian phenomenology (Husserl, 1970). Subsequently, in the third step, I showcase how these core phenomenological themes obtain a more distinctly embodied form in Merleau-Ponty’s (1945/2014) discussion of the body schema, directly implicating the notion of optimal gripping. Finally, in the fourth step, I review contemporary elaborations of optimal gripping in the cognitive and human sciences. I conclude with a discussion of recent research on the relationship between optimal gripping and human personality in the context of applied psychological assessment (Hovhannisyan, 2023, 2025; Hovhannisyan & Goicoechea, 2024; Hovhannisyan & Vervaeke, 2022), demonstrating the significance of optimal gripping—and therefore of phenomenology and embodiment—for psychological theory and praxis.

The Historical-Philosophical Context of Our Inquiry

To apprehend the meaning of optimal gripping, we must first grasp the significance of phenomenology, the philosophical tradition from which it emerged. Psychologists familiar with phenomenology know it as a method of research that allows us to track what is invariant about certain types of experience (e.g. the experience of anger, the experience of jealousy, the experience of shame; Giorgi, 1976, 2009/2014; Smith et al., 2003; van Manen, 2017). This is done by generating core (qualitative) themes from first-personal descriptions of such experiences collected from research participants. But less familiar are they with the fact that phenomenology initially began as a critique of the foundational assumptions of the Western scientific worldview—assumptions about the nature of the world and our place in it (Giorgi, 1976; Husserl, 1970; Heidegger, 1927/1962).

Yet to understand how phenomenology came to be, we must travel to a period in the 17th century characterized by developments that ultimately laid the groundwork for the Scientific Revolution, along with the core philosophical problems that emerged as a result (Fancher & Rutherford, 2017; Hovhannisyan, 2022). We thus begin our story with René Descartes (1641/2008), one of the fathers of the worldview shift that delivered us into philosophical modernity and made phenomenology possible (Hovhannisyan, 2022; Fancher & Rutherford, 2017).

Descartes was wrestling with what was arguably the central philosophical problem of his era, which emerged as a mathematically mediated epistemology was brought to the fore by proponents of the heliocentric movement. Indeed, although we see the sun rise in the east and set in the west, the new hypothesis—grounded in mathematics—indicated that it is we who revolve around the sun, and that our senses merely deceive us (Galileo, 1623/2008). Taken to its upper limit, the attitudinal or epistemic shift inspired by this epistemology meant we could no longer fully trust our senses, or at least take for granted the world that we gleaned from them (Berkeley, 1713/1998; Hume, 1748/2009; Descartes, 1641/2008). Perhaps it even meant that to justify our knowledge claims about the world, we had to properly ground them in a special kind of mathematico-deductive reasoning, or else abandon the task of securing true knowledge of the world altogether.

Indeed, for Descartes, the resultant uncertainty of this shift ran deep, casting doubt on what had previously stood as the very foundation of human knowledge. Further, it brought the status of scientific inquiry regarding “the world out there” to a philosophical halt—if only for a moment. The dilemma was as plain as it was severe: if I presuppose the world as I see it in perception, I am confronted with my own ignorance, unable to justify the world’s existence in itself as apart from my own perceptually grounded, subjective understanding of it. Yet I cannot simply reject the world as somehow “already there,” preceding my own being, lest I succumb to a solipsistic trap that cannot be escaped through subjective means alone. I am thus stuck trying to reach for a world that so obviously appears before me, yet I am unable to trust my capacity to hold this world stably in my grasp, failing to secure it as the proper ground of my being.

Descartes’ solution to this problem was truly radical. Indeed, Descartes (1641/2008) sought to secure a new foundation for all human knowledge, not by circumventing the uncertainty inherent in the world of perception, but by leaning into it as fully as he could. Descartes’ approach, methodological skepticism (a precursor to the phenomenological reduction), entailed systematically subjecting to doubt all modes of knowledge (at least those that were available to his awareness) until he could discover one(s) that cannot be reasonably doubted, paving the very foundation he was searching for. The outcome—informed by the Galilean distinction between primary and secondary qualities—ultimately led to the formulation of Cartesian (ontological) dualism, reflecting a world of two distinct and separate ontologies rather than just one, with mind and matter as the twin threads tying the strange new knot of being (see Hovhannisyan, 2022; Juarrero, 1999).

In the wake of Cartesian dualism, a categorical rift emerged between the self and the world of perception, yielding two explanatory gaps still felt to this day. The first—known as the mind-body problem among philosophers (Chalmers, 2010; Descartes, 1641/2008; Jackson, 1982; Nagel, 1974)—is the problem of how two ontologically distinct substances, mind and matter, can possibly interact despite sharing no common properties (save the fact that they both unfold over time). And the second, epistemological problem, refers to the concern of how subjective minds can obtain valid knowledge of the objective world despite the inherently perspectival—and thus biased—nature of perception itself (Nagel, 1986).

Arguably, the whole of philosophical modernity has been a long-standing attempt to work through, or around, these two gaps (see Husserl, 1970; Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2014). Most contemporary strategies at bridging the first (ontological) gap have tended to be reductionist in kind—with physicalist strategies (reduction in the direction of the material) favored by those with natural scientific leanings, and idealist strategies (reduction in the direction of the mental) favored by those with humanistic leanings (Hovhannisyan, 2022; Thompson, 2007). Alternatively—and at least prior to the late twentieth century—nonreductionist strategies entailed proposing a “magical” third ingredient meant to explain the interaction between mind and matter without collapsing one to the other (e.g. God, in the case of Descartes), though such strategies have largely fallen out of favor in nontheological circles (Thompson, 2007, 2011).

Meanwhile, efforts at bridging the epistemological gap have oscillated between empiricist and rationalist strategies, reflecting a seemingly irreducible tension between the empiricist supposition that there is an ontologically pre-given world—which carries with it the specter of absolutism—and the rationalist supposition that the world is somehow subjectively constructed—which carries with it the specter of relativism (Husserl, 1970). Yet upon closer reflection, we notice a fundamental circularity that brings these two seemingly opposite poles (empiricism and rationalism) together, placing them in a mutual light. For in the case of empiricism, we cannot help but realize that it is impossible to conceive of an entirely mind-independent world except through the frames of our subjective understanding, while in the case of rationalism, we are unable to explain why the world, if indeed constructed, insists itself as the ontological ground preceding and prior to our subjective being.

The phenomenological turn initiated by Edmund Husserl (1970) was meant to ameliorate most if not all of these problems at their core. Husserl (1931/1977) believed that, ironically, Descartes had not been Cartesian enough in his own approach. After all, despite striving for radical doubt through methodological skepticism, Descartes had retained a host of unexamined assumptions—not the least of which was the Galilean distinction between primary and secondary qualities—that undermined his own quest for presuppositionless knowledge (Husserl, 1970). Husserl (1931/1977, 1970) thus sought to complete the Cartesian turn by carrying methodological skepticism to its logical conclusion, ultimately landing him in a position fundamentally different from, and even opposed to, that of Descartes and those who followed in his wake (Husserl, 1931/1977).

The force of Husserl’s (1970) critique is perhaps most evident in his posthumous work, the Crisis, where he systematically articulated how Enlightenment thought led to the various aforementioned problems, or “enigmas,” that continue to impede our present understanding of human experience. At the heart of Husserl’s (1970) critique was the realization that the way the world appears to us—its very structure and character—is actually shaped by how we are oriented toward it. As such, (Husserl, 1935/1970) argued, the world disclosed by the natural sciences—an objective, factual world—is not simply “out there” but is itself a special kind of thematization made possible only through the adoption of a distinctly theoretical attitude (a style of intentionality) that is characteristic of the natural sciences, dating back to the ancient Greeks and only culminating in the Scientific Revolution (pp. 269–299). By mistaking this scientific thematization of the world for its fundamental nature, thereby treating a derivative form of intentionality as an ontological primitive, modern thought commits a deep but subtle fallacy, a fundamental category error, generating confusions too intractable for it to solve.

Husserl (1970) understood that the problems of modern philosophy arise only if we fail to recognize the fallacy brought forth by our assumptions. His claim was that the various explanatory gaps—and the problems they generate—become possible only once we tacitly adopt the supposition of an ontologically pre-given world and treat it as an unquestioned fact. It is this very presupposition that is at the core of Husserl’s (1970) Crisis, and it is precisely its uncritical adoption that has made deep philosophical problems—such as the mind-body problem—as well as the apparent need for solutions (e.g. reductionism vs. nonreductionism, rationalism vs. empiricism) possible in the first place.

Rather than turning to ontology via empiricism—thereby welcoming absolutism in through the front door—or epistemology via rationalism—thereby letting relativism in through the backdoor—Husserl felt there was another way out of this circular bind. By turning to transcendental phenomenology, neither the tension between rationalism and empiricism in the epistemological domain, nor that of reductionism and dualism in the ontological one, becomes necessary in our attempt to grasp the world of perception (Husserl, 1970). Husserlian transcendental phenomenology was meant to dispel the enigmas of Enlightenment thought, not by resolving them but by dissolving the very framework of assumptions that makes them meaningful to begin with (Husserl, 1970). It is in this way that it allowed us to encounter both ourselves and the world of perception in an original, pre-reflective sense, to which we now turn.

Back to the present: Initiating the phenomenological turn

If not an ontological fact, then what is the world, for phenomenology, and how is it relevant to optimal gripping? To begin, while the world presented to us from within the everyday, “natural attitude,” informed by the objective sciences, is a world of material things arrayed in space and always in motion, phenomenology discloses a different kind of world into our awareness (Husserl, 1970; Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2014, 1948/2004, 1964, 1968). Indeed, it invites us to consider not the ontological status of our everyday experiences, nor the epistemic validity of our knowledge claims, but what our experiences mean about how we are existing in the world.

For instance, if we stay within the natural attitude, we might respond critically to a patient who is reporting an encounter with ghosts, dismissing their experience as altogether lacking grounding in reality. But by bracketing our assumptions regarding the reality of ghosts or the validity of claims as to their existence, we may instead focus on the lived significance of what is being reported, thereby making it possible to notice the implicit sense behind the patient’s words. For instance, we might notice that the patient is actually conveying an experience characterized by feelings of horror, confusion, and a disorientation toward what is real, throwing even the very meaning of time itself under question (after all, ghosts are phantoms of the past haunting our present in inexplicable ways). Consequently, it becomes possible for us to realize that the patient is inhabiting a defensive posture, seeking safety from a threat they do not quite understand, just barely able to express themselves while struggling against the oppressive awareness that they are likely going to be dismissed by those who cannot, or will not listen to their story. It then becomes possible for us to meet their need for security, stability, and to be understood, beginning the process of healing and recovery.

Here, we see how the significance of this kind of noticing, made possible by the phenomenological reduction or époche, resides in the fact that it allows us to engage meaningfully with an entire layer of experience—a “pre-reflective” layer, if you will—that is often masked and left invisible by our commonsense pre-understandings (Zahavi, 2008). The phenomenological reduction allows us to disclose this oft-hidden gestalt into reflective awareness, to be seen, understood, and engaged with consciously rather than implicitly and pre-reflectively (Husserl, 1970). Bracketing our assumptions likewise becomes indispensable when trying to broach and see others’ worlds as they do, mitigating the risk of (dis)missing crucial aspects of their existence that might not be immediately evident, or readily available to us.

The broader point is that the phenomenological reduction discloses not a world of inert physical objects, but of possibilities for action—imbued with emotional tones, textures, and solicitations (Husserl, 1970; Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2014, 1948/2004, 1964, 1968). It reveals narrative trajectories that shape an ever-evolving world: a world of becoming, where the present is always organized in a way that is already pregnant with future potential, continuously unfolding—so long as consciousness persists (Thompson, 2007, pp. 312–359). When I notice a cup on the coffee table, I do not see an object made of glass, but the possibility of “grasping,” “holding,” and “drinking from,” or simply “re-filling” once I have had my final sip. When I visit the park near my house, I do not notice wooden objects called chairs, tables, and trees, but areas that are “sittable,” “walkable,” or “climbable;” some, where the presence of adults is appropriate, and others, where it is particularly unwelcomed or even punishable. The phenomenologist understands that the objective meanings in the environment are only derived meanings, an after-thought preceded by a more original gestalt, a horizon of possibilities that is engaged with and interrogated directly and pre-reflectively, through embodied means.

Importantly, for Husserl, the phenomenological reduction was meant to prepare us for a second, more fundamental kind of bracketing. To this end, Husserl (1970) proposed the transcendental reduction (§41, p. 151) permitting us to drop our inquiry to a level even beneath our pre-reflective awareness of the world, disclosing the essentially enactive nature of perception itself.

The transcendental reduction begins the moment we let ourselves wonder what makes certain types of experience possible. To illustrate, let us consider the experience of our sense of distance to the nearest shopping center. On the one hand, if the center were located 20 miles away and we did not have a proper means of transportation available, having to travel by foot instead, the center would feel rather far and thus difficult to reach. Yet the center would also feel “far” if our energy reserves had been utterly depleted from having worked a 20-hr shift with three consecutive nights of sleeplessness prior, even if it were located just a mile away. On the other hand, if we had a vehicle at our disposal, along with an abundance of energy and an excitement for what we might find at our favorite store, even a 40-mile trip would not dissuade us from venturing out, rendering the center “close enough” for our purposes. And yet, even if all of the internal conditions were “just right” (e.g. sufficient levels of energy, desire, excitement, and a reasonable means of transport), beyond a certain threshold of objective distance—whether it be 80, 180, or 1,800 miles—the center would certainly feel “too far,” once again exceeding our reach.

What we glean from this illustration is that the perception of distance can neither be reduced to the objective features of measurable space nor to a mere projection on the part of a willing or capable subject. Indeed, the perception of distance depends simultaneously on both poles of experience and how they are mutually organized—for varying either what is on the subject-pole (bodily structure and capacity) or the object-pole (measurable time or space) necessarily affects how distance is perceived.

The broader phenomenological implication of the transcendental reduction is that the embodied self and the perceptual world co-emerge as two irreducible poles of a common, unitary structure: lived experience (Husserl, 1970; Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2014, 1968). By exploring the conditions of possibility for various types of experience, it becomes possible to see how the intricate interplay of embodied subjectivity and surrounding milieu organizes and constitutes our experiences into what they are, bringing forth the appearance of ontologically pre-given categories in the world of our perception (e.g. distance) (Husserl, 1970; Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2014, 1968). Seen from this perspective, the living subject is always already oriented to a world that is but a reflection of how the subject is moving through it—which, in turn, implies a style of world-enactment that imbues the situation with a pre-reflective handle tailored to the subject’s own distinct style of grip.

Optimal gripping: The phenomenology of attunement

We thus see how phenomenology takes us from a world of objects to a world of possibilities, wherein each possibility is disclosed to us not as a mere thought or idea but as a potential self-world relation—a living gestalt in which the embodied self and world resonate as they become mutually attuned and coupled to each other. When the world falls within our capacity to cope, the fault line between action and perception disappears—then we are truly in the world. The cup appears graspable because of my capacity to hold it, yet any act of holding the cup must reflect the shape evoked and afforded by the cup itself. In this section, I foreground the self-world relation as a fundamental phenomenological motif and illustrate how it has been conceived and articulated in phenomenological thought, demonstrating the basis of the construct of optimal gripping.

In Husserl (1970), we see the emergence of the notion that the objects of perception, rather than ontologically pre-given, are constituted across time by the structures of consciousness (§48, pp. 165–167; Thompson, 2007, pp. 312–359). An object, such as a cup, possesses an indefinite number of profiles from which it can be seen. Yet, it is not the distinct profiles that we perceive first, from which we then infer the presence of the object. Rather, it is the object that first appears within our perception, holding together or organizing the distinct profiles we encounter into a unitary gestalt that we experience as a “cup.” This is to say, objects are enacted or brought forth as the perceptual throughlines that orient us toward our world, endowing it with its sense of stability and coherence, rendering it navigable for our practical purposes (Husserl, 1970, §46, p. 158).

Importantly, for Husserl (1970), the constitution of objects is achieved in terms of how they prepare us for the future (§47, p. 161). Each object is “emptily intended—that is, we anticipate how [the object] will appear within the next profile” (Byrne, 2021 as cited in Robbins, 2024, p. 138). When our anticipations fall short of how the world actually unfolds, we ourselves are caught by surprise and called to investigate, so that we can learn what we missed and regain our grip. The experience of magic illustrates this point well, precisely because when the magician performs his trick, we momentarily lose our grip on perception itself. Surprised and in awe, we applaud the magician for his skill while simultaneously seeking to grasp the secret behind his trick. The need to grasp the missing throughline implicates what Husserl refers to as a tendency toward optimal givenness, the felt need to align ourselves with that orientation or horizon of fulfillment from which objects can appear in their most intelligible or meaningful form across time.

In Merleau-Ponty, we see phenomenology taking on a more distinctly embodied form, crucial for our current articulation of the optimal grip. Merleau-Ponty (1945/2014) explains that consciousness is not fundamentally a matter of “I think,” but of “I can” (p. 139), fleshing out Husserl’s (1970) earlier discussions of bodily kinesthesis in the Crisis (§47, pp. 161–164). The kinesthetic capacities of the body, for Merleau-Ponty, are made possible by the “body schema,” the gestalt of sensorimotor possibilities, or habits, that is always already present, pre-reflectively orienting us toward the world of our practical aims. To this end, Merleau-Ponty demonstrates how not just our conscious (visual) perception, but our very bodily engagement with the world, is organized by a figure-ground relation. In this figure-ground relation, relevant parts of our body (e.g. the hand) are pulled from the background of our awareness into the motor field as bodily acts and anticipations—forming an embodied, situated kinesthetic plan (e.g. reaching out and grasping)—dynamically fitting us to the demands of our situation (e.g. drinking from the cup), in turn affording continuous, meaningful, goal-directed action in the world (e.g. raising a toast at a dinner party, turn-taking in a conversation).

Following Merleau-Ponty, Gallagher (2005) explains that in “just such [prenoetic] performances the body acquires a certain organization or style in its relations with its environment” (p. 32), for “if I reach for a glass of water [. . .] my hand shapes itself in a precise way for picking up the glass” (p. 26). Gallagher (2005) elaborates:

[. . .] the system that is the body schema allows the body to actively integrate its own positions and responses and to deal with its environment without the requirement of a reflexive conscious monitoring directed at the body. It is a dynamic, operative performance of the body, rather than a consciousness, image, or conceptual model of it. (p. 32)

In this way, we see that the body schema is a precondition of our embodied being-in-the-world; it is how we become and remain attuned to the world, experiencing a kind of resonance, or grip with it. Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body schema highlights the fact that consciousness is not merely noetic, but even more fundamentally, motoric. Optimal givenness thus becomes a matter of optimal grip, revealing a pragmatic, embodied normativity inherent in and guiding our actions in the world.

From phenomenology to the phenomenology of individual differences

We are now well poised to consider how these various philosophical insights have made their way into and informed the cognitive and human sciences. To begin, these core themes were notably developed by Dreyfus (2016) in his discussions of skillful coping and skill-acquisition in embodied expertise, highlighting the fundamentally embodied, dynamical, and developmental nature of the optimal grip in cognition. Dreyfus (2016) explains that “once an expert has learned to cope successfully,” it becomes possible to either sense that

he is doing as well as possible [. . .] or he senses a tension that tells him he is deviating from an optimal gestalt and feels drawn to make a next move that, thanks to his previous learning, is likely to be accompanied by less tension (p. 240).

Dreyfus (2016) carefully elaborates:

This tension, this sense of how things are going, is not just a sense of pleasure or pain, comfort or discomfort. It is a normative sensitivity to one’s current situation as better or worse, relative to the optimal (ongoing) state. It is a sense of rightness and wrongness, success and failure, as ongoing processes, not as final goals. (p. 244)

He continues:

Thus, according to Merleau-Ponty, the organism’s behavior is not simply caused by a feeling of how things are going, nor does the organism infer from the feeling what it should do next; rather, the feeling of how things are going motivates its behavior. (p. 244)

Situating these ideas directly within the context of ecological psychology, others have theorized how optimal gripping is achieved within the field of perception itself qua affordances (see Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2014; Di Paolo et al., 2014; Kiverstein et al., 2019; Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014). Ecological (Gibsonian) psychology defines perception in terms of affordances, and affordances as the possibilities for action available to an agent, reflecting the interplay between the objective properties of the environment (e.g. a cup with a handle) and the agent’s own subjective skills and capacities (e.g. a hand that can hold the cup from its handle) (Gibson, 1979).

Against this backdrop, Bruineberg and Rietveld (2014) draw on the free-energy principle (FEP) in cognitive science (see Friston, 2010) to claim that maintaining an optimal grip in perception means being engaged in the world in such a way as to reduce “free energy,” or uncertainty. Free energy minimization is about reducing the discrepancy between anticipated and actual sensory input, or surprisal, the act of which allows an agent to cope with its world reliably, making functional action possible. Notably, the FEP bears interesting parallels with the anticipatory structures of consciousness outlined by Husserl (1970) himself, making it deeply compatible with phenomenological thought. Instead of modeling the objective world, cognitive agents thus embody generative models that guide perception and action. These models consist of contextually sensitive affordances available to an agent in ways that, when acted upon, keep its internal states in dynamic equilibrium with environmental contingencies, thereby achieving an ongoing, self-organizing grip over the situation. In this view, therefore, cognition is not about representing the world accurately but about regulating dynamic sensorimotor exchanges so as to minimize surprisal and stay within expected bounds—a process which we experience as skillful coping, or optimal grip.

Nevertheless, the goal is not minimization of free energy at any cost, which would entail rigidly clinging to the familiar or predictable. Rather, it is the optimization of free energy across multiple timescales (Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2014; Kiverstein et al., 2019; see also Hovhannisyan & Vervaeke, 2022). The trade-off between short-term versus long-term free energy minimization entails a “delay of gratification” problem, most evident in cases of addiction whereby indulging in familiar but harmful behavior (e.g. substance use) may reduce prediction error in the short term, while increasing it dramatically over the long term by undermining social, bodily, and narrative goals. To this end, Bruineberg and Rietveld (2014) introduce the concept of a hypergrip, referring to the orientation from which we obtain an optimal grip on our total field of affordances across time, enabling continuous functional action in our world. The authors illustrate the significance of hypergripping through the example of mountain climbing:

[. . .] a skilled climber is anticipating the affordances ahead; she does not just get a grip on the next hold in climbing, say, but also anticipates that she needs to be able to move on after that. So, the question of relevance sensitivity is not just about grasping the next hold, but rather about which of the available holds afford obtaining a grip on the whole climbing route ahead. One can see again that in such a metastable state, one is flexibly able to switch between different movement regimes and better fit to adapt to the specific details of the environmental aspects. (p. 10)

And what of optimal gripping in the intersubjective domain? Robbins (2024) has recently placed the notion of optimal gripping in dialogue with the humanistic psychological tradition, arguing that agapic love is the optimal grip of social relations. Robbins (2024) proposes a definition of agapic love as

an orientation to the care of others which has cultivated the capacity to be open to the being of the other person, in such a way that radical acceptance allows the other person to more fully develop into their fullest potential (p. 139).

This definition affords a treatment of agapic love as “a regulative idea that, through the building-up of perceptual habits” can seek “fulfilment of the other’s highest potentials for being,” operating as “a normative criterion for ethical relations with others” (Robbins, 2024, p. 139). Robbins’ (2024) contribution is clearly steeped in the phenomenological tradition, which allows him to ground humanistic psychological principles in the phenomenology of embodiment in truly novel ways. Here, Robbins (2024) poignantly elaborates: “agapic loving regard for others, if lived out authentically, could, in principle become operative at the most basic and implicit levels of perception and motor-intentionality, understood in terms of [optimal grip]” (p. 139).

These illustrations showcase an emerging dialogue in the cognitive sciences on the centrality and significance of optimal gripping in cognition. In this dialogue, we notice a powerful convergence on an embodied, pre-predicative normativity that seems to be inherent in all and any acts of optimal gripping. Consequently, we begin to wonder about the nature of this normativity, whether there is any evidence to support it, or even any value to be gained by psychologists from knowing about it.

The Enactivist Big-5 theory (EB5T) of personality, which examines the relationship between optimal gripping and personality traits, has recently sought to address these questions in a way that is theoretically and empirically promising (Hovhannisyan, 2023, 2025; Hovhannisyan & Goicoechea, 2024; Hovhannisyan & Vervaeke, 2022). It advances three core claims.

To begin, the psychology of perception has been largely concerned with the dynamics of moment-to-moment interaction, focusing on how individuals tend to respond to stimuli in their proximal environments across shorter timescales (seconds, minutes, or hours) (Gibson, 1979; Kiverstein et al., 2019; Miller et al., 2023; Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014; Thompson, 2007). Conversely, EB5T initiates a phenomenological turn in the study of individual differences with the realization that, when considered at the longest of timescales (months, years, or decades), individuals’ perceptions of their worlds are organized in patterned and enduring ways along five major dimensions of interaction: (a) reward and opportunity, (b) threat and punishment, (c) goal prioritization across competing timescales, (d) prioritization of self- versus other-goals, and (e) attunement to a broad versus narrow field of possibilities. As such, EB5T advances its first core claim, that individual differences in how people perceive and are oriented to each of these dimensions of interaction reflect differences in their Big Five personality trait measures: extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness, respectively (see DeYoung, 2015; Hovhannisyan & Vervaeke, 2022). This claim allows us to explore the link between personality structure and function on the one hand, and the perceptual and phenomenological dynamics of situated agency on the other hand—thereby allowing us to theorize this important link at timescales normally precluded from the psychology of perception (i.e. months, years, decades).

EB5T then advances its second core claim, that individual differences in traits correspond to functional differences in how individuals behave in and adapt to real-world scenarios organized around the five dimensions of interaction detailed above (DeYoung, 2015; Hovhannisyan & Vervaeke, 2022). In other words, personality traits prepare us to come to grips with the world in unique ways, reflecting individual differences in optimal gripping tendencies (Arellano-Véliz et al., 2024, 2025; Hovhannisyan, 2023, 2025; Hovhannisyan & Goicoechea, 2024; Hovhannisyan & Vervaeke, 2022). No personality type is therefore adaptive or maladaptive, except in relation to the context a person is in, meaning that whether personality traits are functional depends on how well they fit the demands of the situation (Hovhannisyan, 2023, 2025; Hovhannisyan & Goicoechea, 2024; Hovhannisyan & Vervaeke, 2022).

What happens when a trait-situation mismatch occurs or even pervades (e.g. an extravert without any opportunities for social interaction)? EB5T explains that a loss of grip at the timescale of trait-situation dynamics results in and is experienced by the individual as a recurrent pattern of distress (e.g. overwhelming and global feelings of loneliness and isolation), requiring that a sense of grip be regained over one’s world either by altering one’s own orientation (e.g. working through feelings of loneliness and isolation) or by intervening in the environment directly (e.g. pursuing new and more fulfilling relationships) so as to re-establish person-situation fit at the timescale of trait dynamics (e.g. a fulfilled extravert; Hovhannisyan, 2025).

Importantly, EB5T integrates its functional understanding of trait differences with a phenomenological account of how traits structure the world of perception (see Table 1). It thus advances its final core claim, that individual differences in traits correspond to differences in styles of world-enactment (Hovhannisyan, 2023, 2025; Hovhannisyan & Goicoechea, 2024). A style of world-enactment is “a description of how one’s manners of participation in the world, as reflected by one’s traits, prefigure the world as seen and encountered in perception” (Hovhannisyan, 2023, p. 122). This claim allows EB5T to demonstrate that personality traits directly shape and structure the way we see the world—hearkening back to the phenomenological (and enactivist) motif that the way the world appears in perception is not an ontologically pre-given fact but a matter of our intentional orientation.

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Table 1.

The Big Five Personality Traits and Their Phenomenological Co-Relates.

Traits	Phenomenological co-relates
Extraversion	For high scorers, the world comes into view as inviting and welcoming of our projects, as soliciting feelings of excitement, pleasure, and action, where the possibility of engaging with others is seen as attractive and inherently enjoyable and meaningful. For low scorers, the world comes into view less as an open invitation to outward action and more as a setting for reflection, observation, and selective engagement. Opportunities for social interaction or stimulation may appear neutral, effortful, or even draining rather than inherently attractive.
Neuroticism	For high scorers, the world comes into view as inhospitable to ourselves and our projects, as soliciting feelings of anxiety, fear, anger, worry, or withdrawal, where the possibility of acting is seen as dangerous and inherently risky, and what is rewarded instead is security-seeking behaviors. For low scorers, the world comes into view as generally hospitable to ourselves and our projects, as soliciting feelings of calm, steadiness, and assurance, where the possibility of acting is seen as manageable and nonthreatening, and what is rewarded instead is persistence, openness, and confidence in engaging with life.
Conscientiousness	For high scorers, the future is brought into view in our world, which becomes a place for the realization of long-term aims, responsibilities, and aspirations, to be structured and ordered diligently, dutifully, and meticulously, so that we may proceed smoothly toward future goals, steering away from various obstacles along the way. For low scorers, the future recedes from view, and the world appears in terms of the immediacy of the present, soliciting spontaneity and improvisation rather than order and long-term structure. Acting is guided less by distant aims than by momentary possibilities, even if this invites diversion or drift.
Agreeableness	For high scorers, others come into view as needing our care and attention, to be nourished, supported, and prioritized, affording opportunities for peace, social harmony, and closeness rather than conflict and interpersonal distance. For low scorers, others come into view less as requiring care and accommodation and more as obstacles, competitors, or self-sufficient agents, soliciting assertiveness, self-protection, and distance rather than harmony and closeness.
Openness	For high scorers, the world comes into view as a forum for ideas and the imagination, in which the sensory dimension of perception is foregrounded, characterized by interest, curiosity, divergent thinking, and the creative exploration of possibilities. For low scorers, the world comes into view as literal and familiar, experienced in concrete and straightforward terms rather than as layered with metaphor, intuition, or imaginative depth.

This conceptualization of world-enactment from a personality trait perspective has garnered support from a recent qualitative study in which participants were asked to describe recurrent patterns of distress they were facing in their lives (Hovhannisyan, 2023). The participants were also instructed to complete a Big Five questionnaire to obtain standardized trait measures so that the relationship between their patterns of distress and their unique personality traits could be directly studied. Participants’ verbal accounts of their patterns were transcribed and coded according to the rules outlined in the Five-Factor Personality Assessment System (“FFPAS”; Hovhannisyan, 2025). The study found that a common set of traits reliably clustered and was implicated in each pattern of distress identified by a participant. Each trait cluster thus formed the structural basis of a distinct style of world-enactment that was prefiguring or organizing a given participant’s pattern of distress, as well as their style of grip in the situation (Hovhannisyan, 2023, 2025). For example, one participant who struggled with a pattern of procrastination had measures of low conscientiousness and high extraversion, and would lose a sense of grip over her situation (i.e. procrastinate) when she had to study alone. However, she was able to focus either when encouraged by her partner or when she found herself in a study group, allowing her to regain her grip by compensating for a conscientiousness-deficit through various extraverted behaviors (i.e. drawing on partner or study groups for external support) (Hovhannisyan, 2023). Another participant who had a generally low-average level of agreeableness would come to struggle with effectively setting boundaries in interpersonal relationships once an attachment bond had been formed. In his case, attachment bonds fulfilled a “decompensatory” function (Hovhannisyan, 2023), leading to a loss of grip by adjusting the participant’s dispositional tendencies from low to high agreeableness within the context of close interpersonal relationships.

The research subsequently proposed two definitions of recurrent patterns of distress, conceived from a trait perspective. The first is that a recurrent pattern is likely to be enacted when situational demands exceed the adaptive reach of one’s traits and compensatory functions are absent or unavailable (as in the case of the first participant) (Hovhannisyan, 2023, 2025). The second is that a recurrent pattern is likely to be enacted in the presence of decompensatory functions, which constrain the adaptive reach of one’s otherwise typical, and functional, trait profile (as in the case of the second participant; Hovhannisyan, 2023, 2025).

The importance of this research is that it renders breakdowns at the level of person-situation interaction tractable through qualitative means, not just for purposes of applied phenomenological research but also individualized clinical case conceptualization and intervention (Hovhannisyan, 2023, 2025; Hovhannisyan et al., 2026b; Hovhannisyan & Goicoechea, 2024). Moreover, it demonstrates how concepts like optimal gripping, which have historically been confined to the province of phenomenological philosophy or theoretical cognitive science, can be brought to bear on fields like empirical and clinical psychology. Relatedly, a team of researchers in collaboration with the current author are developing a Loss of Grip Scale (“LOGS”), a forced-choice questionnaire based in EB5T seeking to measure a perceived loss of grip in participants’ worlds along the five major dimensions of personality (Hovhannisyan et al., 2026a). The LOGS is set to undergo its first round of validation, further demonstrating the significance of optimal gripping for psychological theory and praxis.

Conclusion

I have argued that cognitive agency cannot be meaningfully understood apart from the lived dynamics of embodied perception. Whereas traditional models began with symbolic representation and the assumption of an ontologically pre-given world, phenomenology begins with the body’s attunement to a world of affordances—a world that is not passively observed but actively brought forth through embodied means. Indeed, the notion of optimal grip reflects the normativity around which such processes of enactment are organized, situating cognition not in the world of abstract mental content but in the intricate interplay between an embodied mind and its world.

In virtue of EB5T, this phenomenological insight is extended into the domain of individual differences, demonstrating how enduring traits disclose different ways of inhabiting and orienting to the world of perception (Hovhannisyan, 2023, 2025; Hovhannisyan & Goicoechea, 2024; Hovhannisyan & Vervaeke, 2022). In this light, traits become styles of grip—structural orientations that endow the world its appearance as interesting, exciting, safe, and actionable, or, conversely, as overwhelming, inert, misaligned, or uninhabitable. The study of personality thus becomes a study of perceptual worlds, shaped not by content alone, but more importantly, by the style of attunement that each person brings to bear on their world of perception.

As empirical research begins to develop tools capable of disclosing disruptions in self-world attunement—such as the FFPAS or the LOGS—the possibility emerges for a genuinely humanistic science of mind (Hovhannisyan, 2018; Robbins, 2013, 2024; Robbins & Gordon, 2015). One that does not treat perception, meaning, and value as afterthoughts, but as primary. One that allows us to see, with increasing clarity, that psychological suffering often stems not from internal deficits or faulty appraisals, but from a breakdown in the relational architecture between a person and their world (Hovhannisyan, 2025; Hovhannisyan & Goicoechea, 2024). And one that reminds us, finally, that the task of psychological inquiry is not merely to describe minds in abstraction, but to illuminate how persons come to find or lose their grip in the midst of life as it is lived.