Browsing by Subject "Affordances"

Now showing 1 - 11 of 11
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    Against smallism and localism
    (University of Białystok, 2015-07-24) Chemero, Anthony; Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; Filosofía
    The question whether cognition ever extends beyond the head is widely considered to be an empirical issue. And yet, all the evidence amassed in recent years has not sufficed to settle the debate. In this paper we suggest that this is because the debate is not really an empirical one, but rather a matter of definition. Traditional cognitive science can be identified as wedded to the ideals of “smallism” and “localism”. We criticize these ideals and articulate a case in favor of extended cognition by highlighting the historical pedigree and conceptual adequacy of related empirical and theoretical work.
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    Agency from a radical embodied standpoint: an ecologial-enactive proposal
    (Frontiers Media, 2020-06-26) Segundo Ortin, Miguel; Filosofía
    Explaining agency is a significant challenge for those who are interested in the sciences of the mind, and non-representationalists are no exception to this. Even though both ecological psychologists and enactivists agree that agency is to be explained by focusing on the relation between the organism and the environment, they have approached it by focusing on different aspects of the organism-environment relation. In this paper, I offer a suggestion for a radical embodied account of agency that combines ecological psychology with recent trends in enactive cognitive science. According to this proposal, while enactivism focuses primarily on describing how our acquired sensorimotor schemes and habits mutually equilibrate, affecting our tendency to act upon some affordances instead of others, ecological psychology focuses on studying how perceptual information contributes to the actualization of the sensorimotor schemes and habits without mediating representations, inferences, and computations. The paper concludes by briefly exploring how this ecological-enactive theory of agency can account for how socio-cultural norms shape human agency.
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    Ecological Psychology
    (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Segundo Ortin, Miguel; Raja Galián, Vicente; Filosofía
    Ecological psychology is one of the main alternative theories of perception and action available in the contemporary literature. This Element explores and analyzes its most relevant ideas, concepts, methods, and experimental results. It discusses the historical roots of the ecological approach. The Element then analyzes the works of the two main founders of ecological psychology: James and Eleanor Gibson. It also explores the development of ecological psychology since the 1980s until nowadays. Finally, the Element identifies and evaluates the future of the ecological approach to perception and action.
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    Ecological psychology and the environmentalist promise of affordances
    (Cognitive Science Society, 2018) Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; Sin departamento asociado
    What is ecological about Gibsonian Ecological Psychology? Well-known senses in which Gibson’s scientific program is ‘ecological’ have to do with its theoretical, ontological and methodological foundations. But, besides these, the Gibsonian framework is ‘ecological’ in an additional sense that has remained understudied and poorly understood—a sense of “ecological” that connects Gibson’s view to the environmentalism of environmental psychology and environmental ethics. This paper focuses on the latter sense of ‘ecological’, and explores the relevance of Gibson’s notion of “affordance” for thinking about environmental issues like deforestation, pollution and climate change. One existing account is criticized and an alternative is proposed.
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    Ecological psychology is radical enough: a reply to radical enactivists
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2019-09-26) Segundo Ortin, Miguel; Heras Escribano, Manuel; Raja Galián, Vicente; Filosofía
    Ecological psychology is one of the most influential theories of perception in the embodied, anti-representational, and situated cognitive sciences. However, radical enactivists claim that Gibsonians tend to describe ecological information and its ‘pick up’ in ways that make ecological psychology close to representational theories of perception and cognition. Motivated by worries about the tenability of classical views of informational content and its processing, these authors claim that ecological psychology needs to be “RECtified” so as to explicitly resist representational readings. In this paper, we argue against this call for RECtification. To do so, we offer a detailed analysis of the notion of perceptual information and other related notions such as specificity and meaning, as they are presented in the specialized ecological literature. We defend that these notions, if properly understood, remain free of any representational commitment. Ecological psychology, we conclude, does not need to be RECtified.
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    Gibson’s reasons for realism and gibsonian reasons for anti-realism: an ecological approach to model-based reasoning in science
    (Cognitive Science Society, 2016) Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; Filosofía; Papafragou, A., Grodner, D., Mirman, D., & Trueswell, J.C.
    Representational views of the mind traditionally face a skeptical challenge on perceptual knowledge: if our experience of the world is mediated by representations built upon perceptual inputs, how can we be certain that our representations are accurate and our perceptual apparatus reliable? J. J. Gibson’s ecological approach provides an alternative framework, according to which direct perception of affordances does away with the need to posit internal mental representations as intermediary steps between perceptual input and behavioral output. Gibson accordingly spoke of his framework as providing “reasons for realism.” In this paper I suggest that, granting Gibson his reasons for perceptual realism, the Gibsonian framework motivates antirealism when it comes to scientific theorizing and modeling. If scientists are Gibsonian perceivers, then it makes sense to take their use of models in indirect investigations of real-world phenomena not as representations of the phenomena, but rather as autonomous tools with their own affordances.
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    Human brain dynamics dissociate early perceptual and late motor‐related stages of affordance processing
    (Wiley, 2024-07-21) Wang, Sheng ; Djebbara, Zakaria ; Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; Gramann, Klaus; Filosofía
    Affordances, the opportunities for action offered by the environment to an agent, are vital for meaningful behaviour and exist in every interaction with the environment. There is an ongoing debate in the field about whether the perception of affordances is an automated process. Some studies suggest that affordance perception is an automated process that is independent from the visual context and bodily interaction with the environment, whereas others argue that it is modulated by the visual and motor context in which affordances are perceived. The present paper aims to resolve this debate by examining affordance automaticity from the perspective of sensorimotor time windows. To investigate the impact of different forms of bodily interactions with an environment, that is, the movement context (physical vs. joystick movement), we replicated a previous study on affordance perception in which participants actively moved through differently wide doors in an immersive 3D virtual environment. In the present study, we displayed the same environment on a 2D screen with participants moving through doors of different widths using the keys on a standard keyboard. We compared components of the event-related potential (ERP) from the continuously recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) that were previously reported to be related to affordance perception of architectural transitions (passable and impassable doors). Comparing early sensory and later motor-related ERPs, our study replicated ERPs reflecting early affordance perception but found differences in later motor-related components. These results indicate a shift from automated perception of affordances during early sensorimotor time windows to movement context dependence of affordance perception at later stages, suggesting that affordance perception is a dynamic and flexible process that changes over sensorimotor stages.
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    La percepción visual del paisaje en la pintura y la fotografía: un enfoque interdisciplinario hacia la presencia espacial
    (Universidad de Murcia, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2020) Carrillo Quiroga, Perla
    Este artículo explora la per‐ cepción visual como experiencia corpo‐ rizada del espacio a través del paisaje en la pintura y la fotografía. Es una in‐ vestigación interdisciplinaria, que busca contribuir al diálogo entre varios cam‐ pos: la fenomenología de la percepción, la percepción del espacio en la neuro‐ ciencia cognitiva y el estudio de las ar‐ tes visuales. La investigación es de ca‐ rácter correlacional y descriptivo; busca por una parte, explorar la relación entre la experiencia de presencia espacial y el realismo de la imagen; por otra, se ob‐ serva si el uso de elementos visuales que sugieren una acción motora en el espectador (del inglés ‘affordances’) afecta la intensidad de presencia espa‐ cial. Además del análisis de literatura, se recolectaron datos a través de un cues‐ tionario ilustrado en donde se presenta‐ ron 26 imágenes, 13 pinturas y 13 foto‐ grafías de paisaje. Este estudio se reali‐ zó con 28 participantes de 18 a 64 años de distintos géneros.
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    Portuguese adults’ concerns on the return to indoor sports practice after confinement due to COVID-19 pandemic -mitigation strategies proposals
    (Universidad de Murcia. Servicio de publicaciones, 2021) Matos, Rui; Amaro, Nuno; Antunes, Raul; Rosa, Marlene
    Objective: This study aimed to get an insight of Portuguese adult people concerns about returning to physical activity and sports practice at indoor sports facilities, after confinement due to COVID-19’ pandemic. Subsequently, an additional approach to the traditional mitigation strategies was to be proposed. Methods: A total of 173 Portuguese practitioners on indoor physical activity or sports before pandemic participated in this study. A questionnaire asking how much concerned (1 –nothing, to 5 –completely) would they be on different contexts and aspects related to this return was applied. Results: respondents were considerably concerned about this theme, especially with touching on common surfaces and proximity to others. Although considerable concerned if having to travel by public transport to the training facility, using locker rooms and with features of the sports’ practice itself, the former received the highest concerns. Additionally, we have suggested modifying some objects (or creating others) that may allow their use with body parts other than hands -an important contagion source -and exploiting the possibility of using intermediate instruments on objects and sports equipment manipulation, preventing users from touching their surfaces directly. Conclusion: touching on common surfaces and proximity to others revealed high degrees of concern on the return to indoor sports practice after confinement due to COVID-19 pandemic. Alongside the rules of personal distancing, respiratory etiquette and surfaces hygiene, it is suggested that sports practitioners, whenever possible, use alternative body parts and intermediate instruments that avoid direct contact of hands with surfaces and sport objects.
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    The Message is the Medium: Mobile Instant Messaging Apps in the Mobile Communication Ecosystem
    (Oxford University Press, 2020-04-20) Aguado Terrón, Juan Miguel; Martínez Martínez, Inmaculada J.; Comunicación
    El trabajo examina el papel de las aplicaciones de mensajería instantánea móvil (MIM) en el ecosistema comunicativo móvil contemporáneo. Este análisis se centra en la evolución funcional de estas herramientas, su impacto en las interacciones sociales mediadas por tecnología y su papel central en las dinámicas económicas y tecnológicas de las plataformas móviles. La investigación analiza cómo las aplicaciones de mensajería, inicialmente concebidas como una extensión del servicio de mensajes cortos (SMS), han superado ampliamente las expectativas iniciales en términos de adopción, uso y transformación social. Estas plataformas han adquirido una posición preeminente al consolidarse como herramientas esenciales para la comunicación personal y grupal, con una notable capacidad para retener y captar la atención del usuario. Su funcionalidad multicanal, que incluye herramientas avanzadas de personalización, las posiciona como epicentros de las interacciones móviles y agentes clave en la reorganización del tiempo y la atención en el entorno digital, un aspecto crucial de los nuevos modelos de negocio en el contexto del Big Data. Metodológicamente, el capítulo adopta un análisis sistémico-funcional que integra perspectivas sociológicas, económicas y tecnológicas. EL estudio parte de un trabajo exhaustivo de análisis bibliográfico y de informes de la industria para cartografiar las tendencias actuales en la investigación de las MIM. Se identifican cinco áreas emergentes: (1) El desarrollo de la complejidad funcional y las capacidades expresivas, (2) las transformaciones en las dinámicas sociales mediadas, (3) el uso de MIM en la comunicación no interpersonal (que anticipa el uso masivo de asistentes personales y el desarrollo de la IA asociado a la explotación intensiva de datos), (4) su evolución hacia ecosistemas de servicios multifuncionales y (5) el impacto estructural y social de la monetización de la conectividad y el trabajo afectivo. El trabajo proporciona un marco conceptual para explorar la intersección entre tecnología y socialidad en el entorno móvil. Su contribución radica en la identificación de patrones emergentes en el uso de las MIM, como la "socialización mediada ambiental", que redefine los límites entre la presencia física y digital. Socialmente, resalta cómo estas aplicaciones transforman las prácticas comunicativas cotidianas, fusionando dinámicas afectivas e instrumentales en entornos digitales y planteando cuestiones críticas sobre privacidad, vigilancia de datos y la mercantilización de las interacciones humanas. En resumen, este capítulo no solo describe la evolución y el impacto de las MIM en el ecosistema móvil, sino que también ofrece una lente crítica para entender cómo estas tecnologías reconfiguran las estructuras sociales y económicas contemporáneas. Su enfoque integral y su capacidad para vincular el análisis teórico con aplicaciones prácticas lo convierten en una referencia valiosa para investigadores, desarrolladores y formuladores de políticas interesados en el futuro de la comunicación móvil. El trabajo se enmarca dentro de la línea de investigación sobre transformaciones tecnológicas y ecosistema mediático que la autora viene desarrollando desde 2003 y supone la sedimentación teórica derivada del análisis de la transformación del ecosistema de medios a lo largo de varios proyectos I+D enfocados en el impacto transformador de la conectividad ubicua y la subsiguiente aceleración de la IA y el Big data como vértices de la hiperconectividad, particularmente del proyecto I+D “MOBILE MEDIA & PERSONAL DATA: Comunicación móvil e información personal: impacto en la industria del contenido, el sistema publicitario y el comportamiento de los usuarios” (CSO2013-47394-R).
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    The risk of trivializing affordances: mental and cognitive affordances examined
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-06-25) Segundo Ortín, Miguel; Heras Escribano, Manuel; Filosofía
    In the last years, we have attended to different attempts to extend the notion of affordance to include mental or cognitive actions. In short, the idea is that our capacity to perform some cognitive functions such as counting, imagining, mathematical reasoning, and so on, is preceded by our awareness of cognitive or mental affordances. In this paper, we analyze two of these attempts, Mental Affordance Hypothesis, and cognitive horizons, and conclude that they fail to deliver their promise. Our argument is two-fold. First, we show that both proposals lack an explanation for how these affordances can be perceived or experienced by the individuals. Second, we argue, focusing on the examples provided by the authors, that the introduction of cognitive affordances is not justified on explanatory grounds. In other words, neither of these proposals offers a compelling justification for thinking that performing said “mental acts” requires the perception of mental or cognitive affordances. Hence, the existence of mental or cognitive affordances remains both scientifically mysterious and explanatorily unjustified.