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Objects and agents: affordance in a material and social
world
Rob Ellis
School of Psychology, University of Plymouth, UK
Mirror and canonical neural systems, and their respective roles in
producing imitation and affordance effects on behaviour, are usually
regarded as serving different purposes. In contrast we will argue that
they are part of a single, dynamic system in which the actions of other
agents and objects in a scene together, and simultaneously, determine
the actions afforded to an observer. We will demonstrate that the
motor systems of mere observers, irrespective of their goals, are
simultaneously affected by multiple sources of possible actions.
These sources include the affordances associated with seen objects,
the spatial relations among the agents and objects, and the actions of
the agents. Thus to reach toward an object in a crowded material and
social world is best understood as a dialectical process among this
network of influences.
Acquisition of action knowledge through verbal
and social learning
Oliver Lindemann
1
, Markus Paulus
2
1
University of Potsdam, Germany;
2
Ludwig Maximilian University,
Munich, Germany
Recent research highlights the importance of motor processes for the
development of functional object knowledge and knowledge about
sensory action consequences. It is unclear, however, whether the
involvement of the motor system goes beyond the processing of
information that is gathered through own active experiences. The
presented studies examine therefore the acquisition of novel object
knowledge and novel action-effect associations in situations in
which active motor experiences are lacking and learning is only
based on verbal descriptions or action observation. Our data dem-
onstrate a selective effect of motor interference on verbal learning as
well as an effect of agency on observational learning. Taken toge-
ther, these findings suggest that covert motor simulations support the
acquisition of action knowledge and provide evidence for a new
ideomotor approach to action understanding while verbal and social
learning.
The power of action. From personal to interpersonal
bodily space
Corrado Sinigaglia
Department of Philosophy, University of Milan
Over the last few years more and more theoretical and empirical
papers have been devoted to find out the neural and cognitive pro-
cesses underpinning basic social phenomena such as sharing and
joining actions in development as well as in everyday adult life.
However, little research has directly explored whether and to what
extent object perception in social contexts, far from being a private
business of single perceivers, it could tell us something about the
mechanisms underlying the primary ways in which we interact with
others. The talk aims to tackle this issue by investigating how a social
context might shape the perception of objectual affordances. To get
this point, in the first part of the talk I will show that objectual
affordance smight depend not only on one’s own reaching space but
also on the reaching space of another individual. In the second part of
the talk I will go into the theoretical implications of these findings, by
introducing and discussing the notion of an interpersonal bodily space
representation that would allow us to map the surrounding space of
other people onto our own action space. Finally, I will conclude by
suggesting that such a interpersonal bodily space representation not
only helps us refining the notion of affordance but also provides us
with a plausible and unitary account of the crucial building blocks for
basic social interactions, shedding new light on the processes that
ground our primary identification with others and our connectedness
to them.
Real and virtual changes to the body affect
the perception of affordances
Jeanine Stefanucci, Sarah Creem-Regehr, Michael Geuss, Kyle
Gagnon, William Thompson
University of Utah, Utah, USA
Embodied perception theories emphasize the role of bodies, simula-
tion, and action as central to space perception. The notion that action
capabilities influence perception is not new, as Gibson (1979) pro-
posed the term affordances 30 years ago. We test one aspect of
embodiment in space perception—whether the nature of body rep-
resentation influences the perception of affordances in extrapersonal
space. In a series of studies, we show that both physical (real world)
and virtual changes to the body influence whether or not people say
they can pass through or under an aperture. We use immersive virtual
environments (IVEs) as a novel approach to study how action capa-
bilities may influence space perception. In IVEs, multisensory
information about the body and sensory-motor coupling can be
manipulated in ways not possible in the real world. We first dem-
onstrate that when the body is made wider or taller through physical
manipulations in the real world, people’s estimates of passing through
or under an aperture are altered, as are their judgments of the width or
height of the aperture. We then establish that affordance judgments
made in real and virtual environments are similar, without imple-
menting changes to the body. Finally, we show that virtual
manipulations of body dimensions (some not possible in the real
world) affect both decisions about action and actual actions with
respect to apertures in IVEs. Overall, our findings suggest that people
flexibly incorporate both visual and proprioceptive information about
their action capabilities when viewing spaces, suggesting that per-
ception is embodied.
PERCEPTION, MEMORY AND ACTION
IN A MULTISENSORY SPACE
Convenors: Franco Delogu
1
, Ineke van Der Ham
2
1
Department of Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute,
Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands;
2
Experimental
Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
The accurate representation of our spatial surroundings is crucial for
adaptation because it enable us to remember where we left objects
S10 Cogn Process (2012) 13 (Suppl 1):S3–S35
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