Object Affordances Potentiate Responses but Do Not Guide Attentional Prioritization

Yamani Yusuke

Ariga Atsunori

Yamada Yuki

Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience

Handled objects automatically activate afforded responses. The current experiment examined whether objects that afford a response are also prioritized for attentional processing in visual search. Targets were pictures of coffee cups with handles oriented either to the right or the left. Subjects searched for a target, a right-handled vs. left-handled coffee cup, among a varying number of distractor cups oriented in the opposite direction. Responses were faster when the direction of target handle and the key press were spatially matched than mismatched (stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) effect), but object affordance did not moderate slopes of the search functions, indicating the absence of attentional prioritization effect. These findings imply that handled objects prime afforded responses without influencing attentional prioritization.

object affordances

visual search

stimulus-response compatibility

visual perception and attention

motor selection

eng

Frontiers Media

Copyright © 2016 Yamani, Ariga and Yamada. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution and reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

[ISSN] 1662-5145

[DOI] 10.3389/fnint.2015.00074

[DOI] https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2015.00074