Epsylon Laboratory, Paul Valery University, Université Montpellier Paul Valéry, St Charles, 34 Route de Mende, 34190, Montpellier Cedex 5, France.
Department of Psychology III, Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany.
Psychol Res. 2021 Jun;85(4):1673-1684. doi: 10.1007/s00426-020-01328-x. Epub 2020 Apr 11.
Classically investigated in the context of judgment tasks about achievable actions, affordances have also been investigated in the context of the stimulus-response compatibility paradigm. Earlier work showed that perceptual categorization performance is significantly faster and more accurate when the orientation of the graspable part of a presented object, and the orientation of the participant's response are compatible, suggesting that the main function of affordances is restricted to action preparation. Here, we investigate the potential role of affordances in the categorization of ambiguous stimuli through a stimulus-response compatibility paradigm. In other words, we investigate if in ambiguous situations, such as ones in which a stimulus may give rise to two percepts, affordances would stabilize perception on one of these two and, therefore, helps in the subsequent categorizations. Two experiments were run, based on the forced-choice stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) paradigm, with a progressive series of ambiguous (bistable) lateral-graspable objects. In Experiment 1, subjects responded by pressing horizontally opposite keyboard keys, while in Experiment 2, the keyboard keys were vertically separated. Experiment 1 found that subjects perceived the initial object in a bistable series for longer, and exhibited greater response stability in compatible than incompatible situations. In Experiment 2, none of these modulations were significant. Overall, our results show that affordances operationalized through a SRC paradigm modulated how subjects categorized ambiguous stimuli. We argue that affordances may play a substantial role in ambiguous contexts by reducing the uncertainty of such situations.
经典的可供性研究是在关于可实现动作的判断任务的背景下进行的，也在刺激-反应兼容性范式的背景下进行了研究。早期的工作表明，当呈现物体的可抓取部分的方向与参与者的反应方向相匹配时，知觉分类的表现会显著更快、更准确，这表明可供性的主要功能仅限于动作准备。在这里，我们通过刺激-反应兼容性范式研究可供性在模糊刺激分类中的潜在作用。换句话说，我们调查在模糊情况下，例如一个刺激可能产生两种知觉的情况，可供性是否会将知觉稳定在这两种知觉中的一种上，从而有助于随后的分类。进行了两项实验，基于强制选择刺激-反应兼容性（SRC）范式，使用一系列渐进的模糊（双稳态）横向可抓取物体。在实验 1 中，被试通过按下水平相对的键盘键来做出反应，而在实验 2 中，键盘键是垂直分开的。实验 1 发现，被试在双稳态系列中感知初始物体的时间更长，在兼容情况下比在不兼容情况下表现出更大的反应稳定性。在实验 2 中，这些调制都没有显著意义。总体而言，我们的结果表明，通过 SRC 范式操作化的可供性调节了被试如何对模糊刺激进行分类。我们认为，可供性可以通过减少这些情况的不确定性，在模糊的上下文中发挥重要作用。
