What is an affordance? 40 years later

Looking to recognise: the pre-eminence of semantic over sensorimotor processing in human tool use

“…It should be noticed that the word "affordance" is probably one of the most ambiguous words in experimental psychology as it has acquired over time a multiplicity of meanings, hence becoming a term that generated confusion in the field of tool use, even among scholars. As an effort to reduce such an ambiguity, in this study, we endorsed the definition of the term as recently proposed by Osiurak and colleagues, i.e., as "an animal-relative, biomechanical property specifying an action possibility within a body/hand-centered frame of reference" (p. 410) 1 . Such an action possibility pertains to the physical but not to the neurocognitive domain, which, instead analyses how affordances are perceived.…”

“…Conversely, when the visuo-perceptual context does not promote action readiness (e.g., bottle-cap), the mechanical knowledge issue may not be so quickly solved, so that the motor control may not be activated, as highlighted by the increment in the fixation time of the tool's functional area. Those results were interpreted by the authors within a reasoning-based theoretical perspective, as suggesting that the flexible visuo-attentional patterns observed in the study might reflect the engagement of different tool-use neurocognitive systems (i.e., the Three Action-System) 1 . Within that theoretical frame of reference, Federico and Brandimonte 2 introduced the concept of "action reappraisal" to refer to the cognitive processing of multiple sources of information (e.g., affordances, mechanical knowledge, functional knowledge, abstract knowledge, etc.)…”

“…Rather, they are confronted with everyday issues (e.g., hanging a picture on the wall), so that they use mechanical knowledge (i.e., technical reasoning) to reason about how to use a tool (e.g., a hammer) and solve the problem (e.g., pounding a nail in the wall). In other words, the reasoning-based theoretical framework supports the idea that people do not passively learn the relationship between objects (manipulation-based approach), but they dynamically generate it in order to "act" within a context 1,6,[27][28][29][30][31][32] .…”

“…Therefore, the study of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of tools is crucial in Cognitive Science. The critical relevance of the topic is well demonstrated by the large amount of research on perceptual and semantic processing of functional and motor properties of tools (also called "affordances") that has been done in the last forty years 1 .…”

“…It is generally accepted that the ventral stream (vision-for-perception system) is involved in object identification and recognition whereas the dorsal stream (vision-for-action system) deals with action-related and visuospatial object information mainly involved in the localization of objects in the space 33 . However, recent lines of research challenged the idea of functionally-separated processing streams for object recognition and object-directed action, assuming a joint and flexible involvement of ventral and dorsal brain areas in affordance processing 1,[34][35][36] . In particular, as an attempt to overcome the dichotomy between manipulation-based and reasoning-based approaches, the so-called Three Action-System model (3AS) has been recently proposed 1 .…”