Department of Neuroscience, Muhlenberg College, USA.
Center for Human Movement Sciences, University of Groningen, University Medical Center Groningen, The Netherlands.
Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2017 Sep;80:622-629. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2017.07.008. Epub 2017 Jul 27.
The concept of affordance is rapidly gaining popularity in neuroscientific accounts of perception and action. This concept was introduced by James Gibson to refer to the action possibilities of the environment. By contrast, standard cognitive neuroscience typically uses the concept to refer to (action-oriented) representations in the brain. This paper will show that the view of affordances as representations firmly places the concept in the subject-object framework that dominates both psychology and neuroscience. Notably, Gibson introduced the affordance concept to overcome this very framework. We describe an account of the role of the brain in perception and action that is consistent with Gibson. Making use of neuroscientific findings of neural reuse, degeneracy and functional connectivity, we conceptualize neural regions in the brain as dispositional parts of perceptual and action systems that temporarily assemble to enable animals to directly perceive and - in the paradigmatic case - utilize the affordances of the environment.
可供性的概念在神经科学对感知和行动的解释中正迅速流行起来。这个概念是由詹姆斯·吉布森引入的，用来指代环境的行动可能性。相比之下，标准的认知神经科学通常使用这个概念来指代大脑中的（面向行动的）表征。本文将表明，将可供性视为表征的观点将这一概念牢牢地置于主导心理学和神经科学的主客框架中。值得注意的是，吉布森引入可供性概念正是为了克服这一框架。我们描述了一种与吉布森一致的大脑在感知和行动中的作用的解释。利用神经科学中关于神经再利用、退化和功能连接的发现，我们将大脑中的神经区域概念化为感知和行动系统的倾向性部分，这些部分暂时组合在一起，使动物能够直接感知——在典型情况下——并利用环境的可供性。
