2012 edition International Conference on Spatial
Cognition (ICSC2012)
Space and embodied cognition
Convenor: Anna M.
Borghi
Symposium Title: Objects and action in the
individual and social space: Affordances and embodied cognition
General abstract
The study of affordances is crucial for an
embodied and grounded cognition perspective, because it clearly highlights how
deeply action influences cognition. Since the seminal work by Gibson (1979) and
the more recent proposals by Ellis and Tucker (2000), in the last years
affordances (and micro-affordances) have occupied an important space in the
embodied cognition literature.
The symposium aims to cover the most recent areas of
research on affordances, which will be investigated in their multifaceted
dimensions. Among other topics, the symposium will address the following
issues: Are affordances automatically activated during object observation? Do
different kinds of affordances exist (e.g., stable vs. variable affordances,
affordances related to function/use vs. to manipulation), and do they have
different neural underpinnings? Are affordances flexibly modulated by the
physical context (e.g., closeness to the agent’s peripersonal
space; presence of multiple affordances evoked by different objects)? And to
what extent does the social context and the presence of a shared space
influence affordances activation? Which are the possible clinical implications
of the study of affordances and space?
Participants:
Corrado Sinigaglia. (University of
Milan, Italy) The power of action. From personal to interpersonal bodily
space.
Elena Da prati. (University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy) Sharing the reaching space: effects on
healthy individuals and psychiatric patients.
Ferdinand Binkofsky (University of Aachen, Germany) Functional
anatomical basis for stable and variable affordances.
Oliver Lindemann
(University of Potsdam, Germany). Acquisition of action knowledge through verbal and
social learning.
Anna Borghi (University of Bologna & ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy). The physical and social
space of affordances
Rob Ellis (University of
Plymouth, UK). Objects and agents: affordance in a material and social
world.
Corrado Sinigaglia.
The power of action. From personal to interpersonal bodily space
Although perception and action have been widely
investigated on the assumption that they can be completely accounted for by
focusing on single individuals, several cognitive neuroscientists, experimental
and developmental psychologists and philosophers have recently argued for the
need to take a social perspective on perceptual, motor and cognitive
activities. Indeed, over the last few years more and more theoretical and
empirical papers have been devoted to find out the neural and cognitive
processes 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. In particular, how, if at all, does our
perception of objects change in a social context, at least at the basic level?
Is it the case that the possibility for other individuals to act on an object
modifies the way in which that object is given to us, starting from its
affording features? How, if at all, do objectual
affordances change in a given situation when they appear to be potential target
of an action performed by another agent? And to what extent can such change
shed light on the basic mechanisms of social engagement?
The talk aims to tackle these questions 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 move from a preliminary definition of the notion of
affordance and I will claim that the relation affordance may be instantiated
whenever an objectual affording feature falls within
the reachable space of a potentially acting body. Indeed, I will show that affordance relation
is dependent not only on one’s own actual 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. I will argue that the
varying range of object graspability can be construed
in terms of a space mirror mechanism that allows the observer to match the
surrounding space of others with her own action space. Like the mirror
mechanism for action, the space mirror mechanism is motor in nature. However,
differently from the mirror mechanism for action, which mandatorily requires
the observation of another individual actually performing a given motor act,
the space mirror mechanism can be triggered by the sight of a potential actor,
that is, of a living body embedded in a situation that supports or even demands
a given set of motor acts. Finally, I will conclude by suggesting that such a
mirror mechanism 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.
Ferdinand C. Binkofski.
Functional anatomical basis for stable and variable affordances
Affordances represent what the environment provides or
furnishes to acting organisms, but they are not properties of the organisms or
of the environment, they rather emerge from the interaction of both. In
extension of Gibsonian view, we proposed the
distinction between stable and variable affordances. These two sets of
affordances are arranged along a continuum and are not dichotomous. Stable
affordances emerge from rather stable/invariant features/properties of objects
which can be incorporated into an object representation, stored in memory.
Variable affordances are processed rather online and allow to establish
processes coping with fast changing object features. The existing
neuroanatomical evidence suggests that those different kinds of affordances
could well be sub-served by different neural pathways. This hypothesis is
backed by a meta-analysis of recent functional imaging studies on interaction
with objects in which the coordinates of brain regions activated by features
related to stable and variable affordances were extracted. ALE based analysis
revealed two separate albeit partially overlapping parieto-premotor
networks: the one related to stable affordances is localized more ventrally (ventro-dorsal stream) to the network related to variable
affordances (dorso-dorsal stream). The results
confirm the parallel processing of the different types of affordances in the
human brain and maybe stimulating for computational neuroscience.
Elena Daprati. Sharing the
reaching space: Effects on healty individuals and
psychiatric patients. Several lines
of evidence suggest that peripersonal space holds a
separate functional value compared to 'far' space (i.e. space beyond arm’s
reach), in terms of ecological relevance, form of encoding, and supporting
neural networks. Importantly, peripersonal space can
be accessed by other individuals, eventually resulting in sharing/competition
effects. It is well known that observation of objects located within reaching
space activates a representation of related actions in both monkeys and humans.
Here, we will describe how memory traces for visually-explored objects are
modulated by their relationship to covert actions and how this link can be
differentially affected in a joint-space condition in healthy individuals and
psychiatric patients.
Oliver Lindemann.
Acquisition of action knowledge through verbal and social learning
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 demonstrate a
selective effect of motor interference on verbal learning as well as an effect
of agency on observational learning. Taken together, 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.
Anna M. Borghi. The physical and social space of affordances
The majority of studies on affordances have focused on
simple actions elicited by objects, such as reaching and grasping, and has
taken into account only the physical environment in which the objects and the
organisms responding to them are embedded. The focus of the presentation is on
how affordances, rather than being automatically activated, imply the
capability to flexibly respond to the demands of the physical and the social
context.
I will briefly overview some studies showing that
objects evoke an action conform to their conventional meaning also thanks to
the physical context in which they are embedded and to their spatial contiguity
with other objects. In addition, I will report evidence showing that the
activation of affordances is modulated by the social relationships existing
between the organisms responding to them.
The way we grasp objects differs depending on the presence of other people and
on their distance in space from objects. In addition, affordances vary
depending on the kind of actions we intend to perform with others, for example
offering or receiving something.
Rob Ellis. Objects and
agents: affordance in a material and social world.
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.
Jeanine Stefanucci, Sarah Creem-Regehr,
Michael Geuss, Kyle Gagnon, William Thomson. Real and
virtual changes to the body affect the perception of affordances.
Embodied perception theories emphasize the role of bodies,
simulation, and action as central to space perception. The notion that action
capabilities influence perception is not new, as Gibson (1979) proposed the
term affordances thirty years ago. We
test one aspect of embodiment in space perception– whether the nature of body
representation 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
capabilities 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 demonstrate 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
implementing 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 perception is embodied.