Disturbance of Ecological Self and Impairment of Affordance Perception

Abstract

Affordance, a radical concept James Gibson introduced in the 1970s, remains controversial today. Defined as environmental properties taken with reference to an animal’s anatomy and action capabilities, affordances are opportunities for action the environment offers. By perceiving affordances, organisms hold meaningful relationships with their surroundings. Affordance is not just a theoretical concept but, as the embodiment of meanings and values, has serious psychological implications. We contend that the lack of these meanings and values underlies the irrational behavior seen in patients with self disorders such as schizophrenia. We reason that it is by perceiving affordances that individuals keep in touch with their surroundings and stay mentally healthy. Using contrapositive reasoning, the reverse could also be true. That is, when individuals experience difficulty maintaining meaningful relations with their surroundings and suffer from mental health problems, we might anticipate that their affordance detection systems are impaired. In two studies conducted in our laboratory, patients with schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease were shown to have impaired capacity to perceive affordances, a result qualifying as contra-positive evidence corroborating the affordance concept. In addition, our results provide support for accepting contra-positive evidence as a complementary tool to positive evidence for empirically validating concepts such as affordance and meaning.

Forgetting ourselves in flow: an active inference account of flow states and how we experience ourselves within them

“…It is, thus, the dividing line of pre-reflective (versus reflective) self-awareness – or sense of (bodily) self-as-subject (versus sense of (bodily) self-as-object) – that is crucial to understanding flow and distinguishes it (and other experiences) from more quotidian life, not the distinction Metzinger draws between the ESM and the MPS, the latter of which, we take in this paper, for simplicity’s sake, to be isomorphic to pre-reflective self-awareness (albeit recognising that this act of identification masks important differences between how the two constructs have historically been presented, cf., see text footnote 21; Blanke and Metzinger, 2009 ; Limanowski and Blankenburg, 2013 ; Metzinger, 2013b ; Zahavi, 2020 ; Kim and Effken, 2022 ; Gallagher, 2023 ). Indeed, given this presuppositional isomorphy, we can claim that some MPSs belong to ESMs, and even EAMs, as in flow.…”

Minimal self-consciousness and the flying man argument

“…This concept plays a role in phenomenological characterizations of the sense of ownership, and the sense of agency ( Gallagher, 2000a ; Zahavi, 2017 ); in recent debates about Buddhist conceptions of the no-self ( Albahari, 2011 ; Siderits et al, 2011 ); in explanations of illusions such as the Rubber Hand Illusion ( Limanowski, 2014 ; Georgie et al, 2019 ); as well as in characterizations of schizophrenia as a self-disorder ( Nelson et al, 2014 ). Despite its relevance to these complex investigations, Kim and Effken (2022 , 15), have recently pointed out that “there are no clear criteria to define the minimal self except for some vague intuitive feeling of ‘a basic, immediate, or primitive ‘something’ that we are willing to call a self”’ (citing Gallagher, 2000a ). Likewise, Lang and Viertbauer (2022) outline a plethora of views on pre-reflective self-awareness, and conclude that given this range of interpretations it “is not surprising that there is not only controversy about what is meant by pre-reflective self-consciousness, but moreover whether pre-reflective self-consciousness exists at all …”…”

Forgetting Ourselves in Flow: An Active Inference Account of Flow States and How We Experience Ourselves Within Them

“…It is, thus, the dividing line of pre-reflective (versus reflective) self-awareness -or sense of (bodily) self-as-subject (versus sense of (bodily) self-as-object) -that is crucial to understanding flow and distinguishes it (and other experiences) from more quotidian life, not the distinction Metzinger draws between the ESM and the MPS, the latter of which, we take, in this paper, to be isomorphic to pre-reflective self-awareness (Blanke & Metzinger, 2009;Gallagher, 2023;Kim & Effken, 2022;Limanowski & Blankenburg, 2013;Metzinger, 2013b). Indeed, given this presuppositional isomorphy, we can claim that some (if not all; see footnote 2) MPSs belong to ESMs, and even EAMs, as in flow.…”