A new article published in Journal of Humanistic Psychology argues that cognition is not something that happens inside the head as abstract information processing, but emerges through an embodied person’s ongoing engagement with the world–a process the author describes as achieving an “optimal grip” on one’s environment.
Traditional cognitive science has treated the mind as a kind of information-processing system, emphasizing internal representations and computations. This perspective gained traction during the cognitive revolution, when advances in artificial intelligence and formal modeling suggested that intelligent behavior could be explained through symbolic manipulation.
However, as Garri Hovhannisyan points out, this approach struggles to account for something more basic: how organisms perceive and navigate the world in real time. For example, it has proven easier to design machines that outperform humans in chess than to build ones capable of holding an egg without breaking it.
Hovhannisyan’s work builds on the phenomenological tradition, which shifts the focus from abstract mental content to lived experience. Rather than asking how the mind represents a pre-given world, phenomenology examines how the world is disclosed through embodied perception. This tradition, associated with thinkers such as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, emphasizes that perception is not passive but actively shaped by the individual’s bodily capacities, goals, and situation.
“I was trained in the phenomenological tradition throughout my graduate education, where I was introduced to a radically different way of understanding cognition than what we’re typically accustomed to in the sciences of mind. Phenomenology shows us that cognition is to be found not in the world of abstract mental content, but in the dance between an embodied mind and its world.”
“When we look closely at how cognition actually unfolds in lived experience, we find that it is not something we simply have in our heads but something we actively do out in the world. It is less like solving logical or mathematical problems, and more like effectively playing a song on an instrument or taking a shot on goal—an active, skillful adjustment to the situation at hand.”
“From this perspective, to have a mind is not to process information like a computer, but to achieve a kind of ‘grip’ on the world as it is encountered in perception. The concept of optimal grip refers to our ability to do this well, to become better attuned, more responsive, and more effectively situated in our engagement with the world.”
“A helpful way to understand ‘grip’ is by analogy to biological fitness. Fitness is not something an organism possesses entirely on its own, nor something imposed entirely by the environment—it is a real relational property that emerges from how organism and environment fit together.
Grip works in a similar way. It refers to how well an embodied mind is able to fit itself to the situation it finds itself in. When grip is good, this fit is smooth, responsive, and effective; when it is poor, the fit breaks down. In this sense, cognition is not just happening inside the head, but in the ongoing process of skillful attunement to the demands of the world.”
The article traces this idea back to phenomenology, particularly Husserl’s analysis of lived experience and Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the body’s role in perception. These frameworks suggest that the world is not encountered as a collection of neutral objects, but as a field of possibilities for action—what ecological psychologists later termed “affordances.” A cup, for example, is perceived not only as an object with physical properties, but as something to grasp, hold, or drink from.
Building on this foundation, the paper connects the concept of optimal grip to contemporary cognitive science, including enactivist and ecological approaches. These perspectives emphasize that cognition involves maintaining a dynamic balance between expectations and sensory input, allowing individuals to act effectively in uncertain environments. Rather than striving for perfect prediction, the goal is to remain flexibly attuned to changing conditions over time.
“The phenomenological approach foregrounds the role of the body and perception in any cognitive act. It shows that how we see and make sense of the world depends on the skillful capacities of our embodied engagement, which vary from person to person. For example, a smile may appear to a layperson as a simple gesture of friendliness, but to a dentist it becomes an opportunity to notice subtle issues with someone’s bite or early signs of decay. Similarly, a lecture hall might present itself to a child as a space for climbing and play, while to a university student it appears as a setting that demands sustained focus, often accompanied by strain but also learning.”
“What this highlights is that the world we experience is not simply ‘given’ in the same way to everyone. It is, in an important sense, enacted—brought forth through our ways of engaging, shaped by our skills, concerns, and projects. This is something traditional models struggle to capture when they focus primarily on internal information processing.”
Hovhannisyan extends these ideas into the domain of personality. He proposes that personality traits can be understood as “styles of grip,” enduring patterns in how individuals engage with and interpret their environments. According to this framework, traits such as extraversion or neuroticism are not merely internal dispositions, but ways of structuring perception and action over time.
“A natural tendency toward ‘optimal grip’ also means that grip can be lost. My work focuses on how different forms of psychopathology can be understood as breakdowns in the relationship between an embodied self and its world, expressed at the level of personality traits.”
“No one has a ‘perfect’ personality. Each of us is well-suited to certain contexts, and less so to others. As situations change, they can exceed our adaptive reach, leading to a loss of grip. This can happen when a situation demands more of a trait than a person can bring to bear, or less than they tend to express.”
“One promising direction for empirical research is to study these recurring mismatches between traits and situations. Doing so may help explain the stable problematic patterns people find themselves stuck in, and provide a more dynamic way of understanding the role of personality in psychopathology.”
Notably, this article appears as part of a special issue honoring the work of Brent Dean Robbins, whose work has been central to advancing humanistic and phenomenological approaches within psychology. Hovhannisyan explicitly draws on Robbins’ extension of optimal grip into the interpersonal domain, highlighting Robbins’ proposal that agapic love can be understood as a form of optimal attunement in social relations, an orientation that allows individuals to remain open to others in a way that supports their development and flourishing.
“One of the main challenges is that ‘optimal grip’ originates in phenomenology, a philosophical tradition, and concepts from philosophy do not always translate easily into empirical science. They tend to be rich and nuanced, but not immediately operationalized in ways that allow for straightforward measurement or testing,” Hovhannisyan explained.
“A related challenge is preserving the meaning of the concept as it is translated. There is a risk that, in trying to make it measurable, we oversimplify it and lose what makes it valuable in the first place; namely, its ability to capture the lived, qualitative structure of experience. Finally, there is the broader challenge of integration. The aim is not to replace existing cognitive models, but to complement and extend them in a way that is both philosophically faithful and empirically rigorous.”
The article calls for a shift in how psychologists conceptualize the mind. By framing cognition as a matter of “grip,” the article advances an embodied, relational account of mind that highlights how perception, action, and meaning arise through ongoing attunement between person and world, while opening the door for extending this framework into areas such as personality and psychological functioning.
The paper, “Embodied Cognition is a Matter of Grip: Humanistic Cognitive Science and the Phenomenology of Attunement” was authored by Garri Hovhannisyan.
