Attractiveness and affordance shape tools neural coding: Insight from ERPs

Abstract

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues.Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. The relation between attractiveness and motor affordance is a key topic in design and has not yet been investigated electrophysiologically. In this respect, action affordance and attractiveness represent two crucial dimensions in object processing (specifically for tools). In light of this evidence, Event Related Potentials (ERPs) enabled us to gain new insights into the time course of the interaction between these two dimensions during an explicit tool evaluation task. Behaviorally, tools that were judged as high affording and high attractive yielded faster response times than those judged as low affording and low attractive. The ERP results showed that early processes related to sensory gating and feature extraction (N100) were sensitive to both affordance and attractiveness; the P200 was dominated by affordance, indexing a facilitated access to motor action representation. The N300, P300 and the Late Positive Potential (LPP) showed enhanced responses for highly affording/attractive tools, reflecting the interconnection between attractiveness and affordance. Later responses were entirely affected by attractiveness, suggesting additional affective responses evoked by desirable tools. We are showing that things that are perceived as more functional and attractive have a privileged neural activation in the time course of tool evaluation, for the first time.

Objects rapidly prime the motor system when located near the dominant hand

“…Goslin et al 2012;Righi et al 2014;Tucker & Ellis 1998;Tucker & Ellis 2001) suggest that affordances exist in humans. However, although spatially informative, the temporal resolution of fMRI is less impressive due to the signal delay of the blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) response.…”

Affordances Feature on Package Design has Preference Effect on Content

“…In this study, we focus on the non-verbal communication initiated by packaging designs, in particular the affordances signified by the design features. Researchers have shown that shape tools with strong affordance will have a positive attractively humans (Righi et al 2014). We hypothesize that the same effect should be found on product packages.…”

“…We consider the first result prove people prefer aesthetic package i.e. the affordance design feature package is pretty (Righi et al 2014); the second one is when we open the box and bottle we need more action like twist or pull, but cup only need a little push. So action feature is useful than indicated feature; the last one is aesthetic preference rather than utilitarian preference even our people know this shape isn't useful they still decide a valuable content has a beautiful package design.…”

“…In packaging design could bring value of user usability. The brain wave has strong physiological evidence, we suggest human think a high affordance object is also a high attractive object by instinct, so if subjects look at a high affordance object but low has attractive, we will confuse and our brain will cost large energy to process contradiction (Righi et al 2014).…”

Aesthetic perception and its minimal content: a naturalistic perspective

“…However, there are an increasing number of neuropsychological studies that support our argument concerning the relation between aesthetics and potentialities for action. Recently, Righi et al (2014) provided evidence in favor of the hypothesis that aesthetic values allow perceivers to enhance the detection of potential actions and, consequently, the detection of motor affordances (see also Xenakis and Arnellos, 2013), showing that objects that are perceived to work better and to be highly attractive have a privileged and selective neural activation. Additionally, activations in brain areas related to preparation for action suggest a coupling between the perception of an object and the type of action that could possibly manipulate it (Baber, 2006).…”