Mental spatial transformations such as rotation and folding have been well-characterised both behaviorally and electrophysiologically. However, the parity of mental rotation and mental folding mechanisms is an unresolved question. The neurophysiological signature of mental rotation is a late negative deflection over parietal regions that becomes more negative with greater rotation angles. The same negativity is present during mental folding, but typically does not change in amplitude with different folding difficulties. This dissociation suggests that the two processes may rely on separate mechanisms, or it could occur due to typical mental folding experiments utilising stimuli for which each fold involves a fixed 90° transformation angle . The aim of this study is to test the latter explanation. If varying the angle of folding required coincides with changes to the magnitude of the folding-related parietal negativity, mental folding can be viewed as a series of rotations for the component parts of an object. Participants will mentally fold a cube net to completion to decide whether two points on the net will meet. In a 2x2 design, the cube nets will require different numbers of folding (4 faces carried vs 6 faces carried), and the folds will require different degrees of rotation to complete (50° vs 90°). Electroencephalography data will be analysed to determine the presence of a transformation negativity over parietal leads between 400-800 ms. Greater negativity in this component for larger degrees of folding angle will be taken as evidence for a shared mechanism between mental folding and mental rotation.

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.