Affordances, i.e. the opportunity of actions offered by the environment, are one of the central research topics for the theoretical perspectives that view cognition as emerging from the interaction between the environment and the body. Being at the bridge between perception and action, affordances help to question a dichotomous view of perception and action. While Gibson’s view of affordances is mainly externalist, many contemporary approaches define affordances as the product of long-term visuomotor associations in the brain. These studies have emphasized (...) the fact that affordances are activated automatically, independently from the context and the previous intention to act: for example, affordances related to objects’ size would emerge even if the task does not require focusing on size. This emphasis on the automaticity of affordances has led to overlook their flexibility and contextual-dependency. In this contribution I will outline and discuss recent perspectives and evidence that reveal the flexibility and context-dependency of affordances, clarifying how they are modulated by the physical, cultural and social context. I will focus specifically on social affordances, i.e. on how perception of affordances might be influenced by the presence of multiple actors having different goals. (shrink)

Traditionally, research on affordances and emotions follows two separate routes. For the first time, this article explicitly links the two phenomena by investigating whether, in a discrimination task, the motivational states induced by emotional images can modulate affordances-related motor response elicited by dangerous and neutral graspable objects. The results show faster RTs: for both neutral and dangerous objects with neutral images; for dangerous objects with pleasant images; for neutral objects with unpleasant images. Overall, these data support a significant effect of (...) emotions on affordances. The article also proposes a brain neural network underlying emotions and affordance interplay. (shrink)

The phenomenology of atmospheres is recently gaining attention in debates on situated affectivity. Atmospheres are defined as holistic affective qualities of situations that integrate disparate affective forces into an identifiable and unitary gestalt. They point to a blurred, pathic, relational, and pre-individual form of experience which has been described in terms of ecological affordances. Despite its relevance in diverse areas of research such as architecture, phenomenological psychiatry and aesthetics, a thorough analysis of the phenomena of affective atmospheres from an enactive-ecological (...) perspective is missing in the literature. This article aims at clarifying how and to what extent affective atmospheres can be accommodated into ecological-enactive understandings of the environment in terms of affordances. To do so, I review four perspectives on ecological affordances – the gibsonian account, the relational account, affective affordances, and the Skill Intentionality Framework (SIF) – and contrast them with the ontological and epistemológical principles that ground the phenomenology of atmospheres. I argue that only the field perspective developed in SIF is compatible with the phenomenology of atmospheres. From this perspective, affective atmospheres can be understood as phenomenological counterparts of context sensitivity, that is, as the holistic and pathic background feelings that make certain affordances more salient than others. As a conclusion, the analysis in this article shows the potential of the phenomenology of atmospheres to enrich the ecological-enactive cognition framework. It also highlights the opportunity to construct a situated understanding of affectivity that is informed by phenomenological perspectives. (shrink)

The peripersonal space is an adaptive and flexible interface between the body and the environment that fulfills a dual-motor function: preparing the body for voluntary object-oriented actions to interact with incentive stimuli and preparing the body for defensive responses when facing potentially harmful stimuli. In this position article, we provide arguments for the sensorimotor rooting of the peripersonal space representation and highlight the variables that contribute to its flexible and adaptive characteristics. We also demonstrate that peripersonal space represents a mediation (...) zone between the body and the environment contributing to not only the control of goal-directed actions but also the organization of social life. The whole of the data presented and discussed led us to the proposal of a new theoretical framework linking the peripersonal action space and the interpersonal social space and we highlight how this theoretical framework can account for social behaviors in populations with socio-emotional deficits. (shrink)

Spatial, physical, and semantic magnitude dimensions can influence action decisions in human cognitive processing and interact with each other. For example, in the SNARC effect, semantic numerical magnitude facilitates left-hand or right-hand responding dependent on the small or large magnitude of number symbols. SNARC-like interactions of numerical magnitudes with the radial spatial dimension (depth) were postulated from early on. Usually, the SNARC effect in any direction is investigated using fronto-parallel computer monitors for presentation of stimuli. In such 2D setups, however, (...) the metaphorical and literal interpretation of the radial depth axis with seemingly close / far stimuli or responses are not distinct. Hence, it is difficult to draw clear conclusions with respect to the contribution of different spatial mappings to the SNARC effect. In order to disentangle the different mappings in a natural way, we studied parametrical interactions between semantic numerical magnitude, horizontal directional responses, and perceptual distance by means of stereoscopic depth in an immersive virtual reality (VR). Two VR experiments show horizontal SNARC effects across all spatial displacements in traditional latency measures and kinematic response parameters. No indications of a SNARC effect along the depth axis, as it would be predicted by a direct mapping account, were observed, but the results show a non-linear relationship between horizontal SNARC slopes and physical distance. Steepest SNARC slopes were observed for digits presented close to the hands. We conclude that spatial-numerical processing is susceptible to effector-based processes but relatively resilient to task-irrelevant variations of radial-spatial magnitudes. (shrink)