bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/170316; this version posted July 31, 2017. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-ND 4.0 International license. Are allocentric spatial reference frames compatible with theories of Enactivism? Sabine U. Königa,*,†, Caspar Goekea,*, Tobias Meilingerb, Peter Königa,c a Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück, Wachsbleiche 27, 49090 Osnabrück, Germany b Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Spemannstr. 38, 72076 Tübingen, Germany c Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg- Eppendorf, Martinistr. 52, 20246 Hamburg, Germany * shared first authorship † Corresponding author: Sabine U. König,
[email protected], +49 541 969 3901 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/170316; this version posted July 31, 2017. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-ND 4.0 International license. Abstract Theories of Enactivism propose an action-oriented approach to understand human cognition. So far, however, empirical evidence supporting these theories has been sparse. Here, we investigate whether spatial navigation based on allocentric reference frames that are independent of the observer’s physical body can be understood within an action-oriented approach. Therefore, we performed three experiments testing the knowledge of the absolute orientation of houses and streets towards north, the relative orientation of two houses and two streets, respectively, and the location of houses towards each other in a pointing task.