Apraxia of tool use is not a matter of affordances

How can we improve our understanding of skillful motor control and apraxia? Insights from theories of “affordances”

“…Rather, an alternative tool is selected based on the properties which best allow for the accomplishment of the action goal based on known mechanical/functional properties of tools. This embodies the first two assumptions of Osiurak (2013). Under MSAG, interconnected modules are triggered by an action goal that afford semantic flexibility of tools; tool (selection), usage context (refinement, as tools have multiple uses), and neurobiomechanics (motor specifics).…”

“…While Osiurak emphasized the alternative commentary (Pellicano et al, 2011), we feel it is worth noting that many of the ideas presented by Osiurak (2013) reflect core concepts of our 2010 MSAG theory. For example, in Figure 2 of the MSAG proposal paper (Mizelle and Wheaton, 2010b), selection of alternative tools when the canonical tool is not available (we use the example of tools within a reasonable workspace) is not necessarily driven by a broad range of stable affordances (the adaptive grounded view).…”

“…A recent opinion article published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (Osiurak, 2013) points out several challenges of the study of “affordances” related to investigations of apraxia. In 2010, we published in Frontiers a review and theoretical proposal that addresses our concerns about affordances and grounded cognition (Mizelle and Wheaton, 2010b).…”

Tool use disorders after left brain damage

“…The role of the production system is to generate a specific movement pattern by taking into account both the environmental constraints and the tool action representation built by the conceptual system (for discussion, see Osiurak, 2013a,b). The dorsal stream would be the neural basis of this production system (Heilman et al, 1986; Buxbaum, 2001; Binkofski and Buxbaum, 2013).…”

Exploring the Role of Action Consequences in the Handle-Response Compatibility Effect

“…Therefore, it would be intriguing to manipulate the axis of visible/latent goal-directed components of tools when studying action anticipation and affordance perception in these patients. Likewise, we believe that our study may also have some clinical relevance when investigating affordance perception in brain-damaged patients with motor apraxia, who struggle at coordinating distal movements (Osiurak, 2013). Indeed, systematically varying the axis where these movements take place would prove valuable in order to assess the involvement of two different processes in these patients, that is, attention processes that may be at the basis of spatial stimulus-response associations, and intention processes that may generate responseeffect associations.…”