Abstract
The Gibsonian notion of affordance has been massively employed in cognitive sciences to characterize the tight interdependence between hand-related actions, manipulable objects and peripersonal space. A behavioural facilitation effect, indeed, is observed for grasping actions directed to objects located in the ‘reachable’ peripersonal space. Relevantly, this relationship is supported by dedicated neural systems in the brain. The original notion of affordance, however, was directly inspired by real-time interactions between animals and their extended natural environment. Consistently, also the extrapersonal space representation can be significantly modulated by action-related factors, and the brain contains dedicated systems for the representation of topographical space and navigation. Here we examined whether a facilitation effect could be also described for a walking-related action in the far extrapersonal space. To this aim, we employed a go/no-go paradigm requiring subjects to execute a footstep ahead in response to pictures of a virtual reality environment containing objects located at different distances (near, far) and eccentricities (central, peripheral). A walking-related, facilitation effect for distant extrapersonal locations was found, suggesting an automatic trigger of walking by positions that preferentially guide spatial exploration. Based on the parallelism with the literature on micro-affordances, we propose that this effect can be described in terms of “macro-affordances”.
Highlights
Contemporary cognitive science has been largely influenced by the ethologically-inspired idea that the brain’s functional architecture is organized to reflect the interactive nature of animals’ behaviour in their natural environment[1]
Subsequent studies have shown that this behavioural facilitation is observed when graspable objects are located within the reachable peripersonal space[6,7], indicating that the perception of the affording features of an object is spatially constrained, i.e. it depends on the spatial relationship between the objects and the motor actor
Here we investigated whether, as for grasping towards centrally-presented objects in the peripersonal space, a facilitation effect could be observed for a walking-related action in response to targets located at further vs. nearer and peripheral vs. central positions of the extrapersonal space
Summary
Contemporary cognitive science has been largely influenced by the ethologically-inspired idea that the brain’s functional architecture is organized to reflect the interactive nature of animals’ behaviour in their natural environment[1]. Since its inception in 19792, the notion of affordances as perceivable opportunities of action offered by the environment to an animal has been massively employed in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience to explain and interpret a series of findings indicating that object- and space-related representations are inextricably linked to action-related representations[3] Within this framework, the majority of experimental works have focused on the relationship between hand-related actions, manipulable objects and the reachable peripersonal space. It has been recently shown that priming of leg-related actions, such as walking and running, can significantly expand the portion of extrapersonal space judged as near in other-based coordinates[19] as well as that the peripersonal space is significantly extended during full-body actions such as walking (as compared to standing[20]) Taken together, these results are relevant as they show, for the first time, that visual perception of the extended physical environment is strongly influenced by action possibilities, capabilities and/or intentionality
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