An all-purpose framework for affordances. Reconciling the behavioral and the neuroscientific stories

Abstract

Research on the concept of affordance generated different interpretations, which are due to different stories aimed at describing how this notion accounts for visually guided motor behaviors. On the one hand, dispositional accounts of affordances explain how affordances emerge from the encounter of the agent’s perceptual-motor skills, with an object offering possible interactions, as behavioral dispositional properties. On the other hand, cognitive neuroscience explains what neural mechanisms are required for agents to detect affordances, resulting from an internal processing. As the literature recognized, it would be beneficial to connect these two stories. We propose an important step into this connection, showing how a dispositional notion of affordance can be distinguished into two versions, the Dispositional Account of Nomological Affordance Response and the Dispositional Account of Probable Affordance Response, and how to complement different aspects of visuomotor processing for affordance extraction, discussed in neuroscience, with them. An important benefit of our proposal is that it suggests, for the first time, that we should not prefer one dispositional account at the expense of the other. Indeed, we show that different dispositional accounts can capture distinct aspects of the plethora of complex manifestations, at the neurocognitive level of visuomotor-processing, that affordances can display in humans, both in healthy and pathological subjects.