Postcognitivism and the Unfolding of a Music Cognition Research Program: Embodiment, Imagination, and Intersubjectivity in the Latin American South

This narrative review examines a research program in psychology of music developed over two decades in Latin American South, tracing how studies at the intersection of music psychology, developmental psychology, and the philosophy of mind articulated a postcognitivist account of musical experience. The program unfolded in three overlapping phases: a focus on the listener’s imaginative engagement with tonal structure (2004–2009); an expansion toward embodied and intersubjective processes in adult–infant interaction and musical performance (2010–2018); and a consolidation around the second-person perspective and social enactivism (2018–present). The review revolves around five thematic axes: imaginative ontogenesis, metaphorization in adult musical practice, the postcognitivist turn, embodied performance, and second-person social cognition. Across studies of communicative musicality, image-schematic listening, cross-cultural and tango performance, jazz duos, ensembles, and dancing crowds, a recurring finding emerges: embodied engagement with shared musical structure takes stable but idiosyncratic, culturally and stylistically specific forms, rather than converging through a common entrainment mechanism. The program is discussed in relation to predictive processing, the coupling–constitution debate, simulation-theoretic, entrainment, and new-materialist accounts. Its limits—situatedness, the corroborative rather than comparative status of its second-person claims, and an underdeveloped pedagogical line—are acknowledged, and a future agenda is outlined.