The role of attention in the occurrence of the affordance effect

Riggio, Lucia; Iani, Cristina; Gherri, Elena; Benatti, Fabio; Rubichi, Sandro; Nicoletti, Roberto

doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2007.08.008

Cited by 71 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 27 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The object-based Simon effect increased from 7.5 ms at the two shortest RT quintiles to 17.5 ms at the two longest ones. This result was replicated by Iani, Baroni, Pellicano, and Nicoletti (in press), who used the same task as Riggio et al (2008), with two main exceptions: The stimuli were presented laterally, and participants responded by performing reaching movements with the left or right hand. At the beginning of each trial, participants pressed left and right start keys with the index fingers.…”

Section: Object-based Simon Effectssupporting

confidence: 63%

“…Riggio et al (2008) reported a distribution analysis for an experiment in which left and right keypresses were made with the index fingers to the upright-inverted orientations of kitchen objects with graspable handles. The object-based Simon effect increased from 7.5 ms at the two shortest RT quintiles to 17.5 ms at the two longest ones.…”

Section: Object-based Simon Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Reaction time distribution analysis of spatial correspondence effects

2011

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Since 1994, group reaction time (RT) distribution analyses of spatial correspondence effects have been used to evaluate the dynamics of the spatial Simon effect, a benefit of correspondence of stimulus location information with response location for tasks in which stimulus location is irrelevant. We review the history and justification for analyzing group RT distributions and clarify which conditions result in the Simon effect decreasing across the distribution and which lead to flat or increasing functions. Although the standard left-right Simon effect typically yields a function for which the effect decreases as RT increases, in most other task variations, the Simon effect remains stable or increases across the RT distribution. Studies that have used other means of evaluating the temporal dynamics of the Simon effect provide converging evidence that the changes in the Simon effect across the distribution are due mainly to temporal activation properties, an issue that has been a matter of some dispute.Keywords Correspondence effects . Delta plots . Simon effect . Stimulus-response compatibility . Time course of processing In the late 1960s and early 1970s, J. R. Simon reported the results of reaction time (RT) studies in which participants made a left or right manual response to a feature of a stimulus (e.g., red-green color of a visual stimulus) presented in a left or a right location (see Fig. 1; see, e.g., Simon & Small, 1969; see Simon, 1990, for a review). RT was shorter when stimulus and response locations corresponded than when they did not, a result called the Simon effect (Hedge & Marsh, 1975). This two-choice task has come to be prototypical, and we refer to it and the resulting Simon effect as standard. The term Simon effect has been extended to include correspondence effects for other irrelevant stimulus dimensions that overlap with, or are similar to, a response dimension (Kornblum, Hasbroucq, & Osman, 1990), but we focus on task variations that entail correspondence of spatial information and manual responses.Studies of the Simon effect and related correspondence effects focused on differences in mean RT at first (see Lu & Proctor, 1995), and these differences are still the focal point of a lot of investigations. However, beginning with De Jong, Liang, and Lauber (1994), many authors have also reported analyses of the RT distributions, dividing them into quantiles, or bins, that contain RTs in the range of percentile values (e.g., between the 50th and 60th percentiles) and measuring the Simon effect for each bin. De Jong et al. (1994) found that the Simon effect for visual tasks was largest at the short RT bins and decreased across the distribution. This result has typically been attributed to rapid activation of the response code corresponding to the irrelevant location feature, followed by decrease of that activation. But, this temporal activation account has been debated (e.g., Roswarski & Proctor, 2003;Zhang & Kornblum, 1997), and the pattern of decreasing effect size across the RT di...

show abstract

Section: Object-based Simon Effectssupporting

confidence: 63%

Section: Object-based Simon Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reaction time distribution analysis of spatial correspondence effects

2011

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Roberts & Humphreys, 2011b) or, somewhat relatedly, the role of attention as a possible confound in experiments investigating affordances via stimuli with lateralised handles (e.g. Anderson et al, 2002;Cho & Proctor, 2010;Riggio et al 2008). Here, we instead consider the extent to which affordances develop for objects appearing inside and outside the locus of covert visuospatial attention.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are object affordances fully automatic? A case of covert attention.

Makris

Hadar²,

Yarrow³

2013

Behavioral Neuroscience

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This is the unspecified version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link AbstractInspired in part by Gibson's (1979) ecological approach to perception, current neurocognitive theories of action suggest that the simple viewing of an object can automatically elicit motor programs for specific acts. However, the degree to which such affordances should be considered truly automatic is unknown. Here we explored the generation of motor plans afforded by pairs of cue objects that were viewed peripherally under different attentional states. Participants focussed centrally while attending to just one of two peripheral cue objects that together had a strong significance for pinching, grasping, or both. They were instructed to ignore the objects and instead give power or precision grip responses to subsequent changes in background colour. The data showed a significant interaction between type of response and type of object, indicating that object affordances are perceived even in non-foveal vision. Critically, the generation of affordances was modulated by the locus of attention: Motor preparation was biased towards the attended object when two different categories of object appeared in the same trial, but the generation of affordances was also influenced by unattended stimuli. This finding demonstrates that object-action priming is not completely automatic, instead being constrained by processes of perceptual selection.

show abstract

“…Similarly, a number of later behavioural studies indeed found that, regardless of whether the whole object or any of its parts is currently in the viewer's attentional focus, affordance effects are automatically evoked (e.g., Pappas and Mack, 2008;Phillips and Ward, 2002;Riggio et al, 2008;. Pappas and Mack (2008), for example, found that the affordance effect can be triggered outside of the viewer's conscious perception by copresent but undetected objects with similar affordances.…”

Section: Visual and Linguistic Cues To Manual Grasp Affordancesmentioning

confidence: 99%