4E cognition and music: an integrative literature review

The concept of 4E Cognition involves the idea that human cognition occurs not only in the brain, but in four dimensions: extended, enacted, embedded, and embodied. In this paper, we aim to identify the studies that investigate 4E Cognition in the field of music. The topic has been extensively explored over the past two decades by researchers in cognitive sciences; however, it was only from 2017 onwards that studies related to music and the "4E" were published in journals from the United States and the United Kingdom. In this review, we adopted the PRISMA research protocol complemented by the SPIDER model. From nine databases, 15 articles were selected in the first stage. The results demonstrate that social interactivity, creative processes, and learning are dominant themes among the studies investigating the application of 4E Cognition in music. As an additional contribution, this work introduces the concept of 4E Cognition in the Brazilian scientific literature in the field of music.