Human Brain Dynamics Dissociate Early Perceptual and Late Motor-Related
Stages of Affordance Processing.
Abstract
Affordances, the opportunity for action offered by the environment to an
agent, are vital for meaningful behavior and exist in every interaction
with the environment. Regarding its temporal mechanism, some studies
suggest that affordance perception is an automated process that is
independent from the visual context and bodily interaction with the
environment, while others argue that it is modulated by the visual and
motor context in which affordances are perceived. We aims to resolve
this debate by examining affordance automaticity from the perspective of
sensorimotor time windows. We replicated a previous study on affordance
perception in which participants actively moved through doors of
different width in VR environments. To investigate the impact of
different forms of bodily interactions with an environment, i.e., the
movement context (physical vs. joystick movement), we used the identical
virtual environment from Djebbara and colleagues (2019) but displayed it
on a 2D screen with participants moving through different wide doors
using the laptop keyboard. We compared components of the event-related
potential (ERP) from the continuously recorded electroencephalogram
(EEG) that were previously reported to be related to affordance
perception of architectural transitions (passable and impassable doors).
Comparing early sensory and later motor-related ERPs, our study
replicated ERPs reflecting early affordance perception but found
differences in later motor-related components. It indicates a shift from
automated perception of affordances during early sensorimotor time
windows to movement context dependence of affordance perception at later
stages suggesting that affordance perception is a dynamic and flexible
process that changes over sensorimotor stages.