Is there a lower visual field preference in object affordances? A registered report.

It’s been repeatedly shown that pictures of graspable objects can facilitate visual processing and motor responses, even in the absence of reach-to-grasp actions, an effect often attributed the concept of affordances, originally introduced by Gibson (1979). A classic demonstration of this is the handle compatibility effect, which is characterised by faster reaction times when the orientation of a graspable object’s handle is compatible with the hand used to respond, even when the handle orientation is task irrelevant. Nevertheless, whether faster RTs are due to affordances or spatial compatibility effects has been significantly debated. In the proposed studies, we will use a stimulus-response compatibility paradigm to investigate firstly, whether we can replicate the handle compatibility effect while controlling for spatial compatibility. Here, participants will respond with left- or right-handed keypresses to whether the object is upright or inverted and, in separate blocks, whether the object is red or green. RTs will be analysed using repeated-measures ANOVAs. In line with an affordance account, we hypothesise that there will be larger handle compatibility effects for upright/inverted compared to colour judgements, as colour judgements do not require object identification and are not thought to elicit affordances. Secondly, we will investigate whether the handle compatibility effect shows a lower visual field (VF) advantage in line with functional lower VF advantages observed for hand actions. We expect larger handle compatibility effects for objects viewed in the lower VF than upper VF, given that the lower VF is the space where actions most frequently occur.

Value Associations Modulate Visual Attention and Response Selection

Every day, we are confronted with a vast amount of information that all competes for our attention. Some of this information might be associated with rewards (e.g., gambling) or losses (e.g., insurances). To what extent such information, even if irrelevant for our current task, not only attracts attention but also affects our actions is still a topic under examination. To address this issue, we applied a new experimental paradigm that combines visual search and a spatial compatibility task. Although colored stimuli did not modulate the spatial compatibility effect more than gray stimuli, we found clear evidence that reward and loss associations attenuated this effect, presumably by affecting attention and response selection. Moreover, there are hints that differences in these associations are also reflected in a modulation of the spatial compatibility effect. We discuss theoretical implications of our results with respect to the influences of color, reward, and loss association on selective attention and response selection.

The Effect of Sport Practice on Enhanced Cognitive Processing of Bodily Indices: A Study on Volleyball Players and Their Ability to Predict Hand Gestures

To program proper reactions, athletes must anticipate opponents’ actions on the basis of previous visuomotor experience. In particular, such abilities seem to rely on processing others’ intentions to act. We adopted a new approach based on an attentional spatial compatibility paradigm to investigate how elite volleyball players elaborate both spatial and motor information at upper-limb posture presentation. Forty-two participants (18 volleyball players and 17 nonathlete controls assigned to Experiments 1 a and b, and eight basketball players assigned to Experiment 2) were tested to study their ability to process the intentions to act conveyed by hands and extract motor primitives (i.e., significant components of body movements). Analysis looked for a spatial compatibility effect between direction of the spike action (correspondence factor) and response side for both palm and back of the hand (view factor). We demonstrated that volleyball players encoded spatial sport-related indices from bodily information and showed preparatory motor activation according to the direction of the implied spike actions for the palm view (Experiment 1; hand simulating a cross-court spike, p = 0.013, and a down-the-line spike, p = 0.026) but both nonathlete controls (Experiment 1; both p < 0.05) and other sports athletes (basketball players, Experiment 2; p = 0.34, only cross-court spike) did not. Results confirm that elite players’ supremacy lies in the predictive abilities of coding elementary motor primitives for their sport discipline.

Mental representation of autobiographical memories along the sagittal mental timeline: Evidence from spatiotemporal interference

Time is usually conceived of in terms of space: many natural languages refer to time according to a back-to-front axis. Indeed, whereas the past is usually conceived to be “behind us”, the future is considered to be “in front of us.” Despite temporal coding is pivotal for the development of autonoetic consciousness, little is known about the organization of autobiographical memories along this axis. Here we developed a spatial compatibility task (SCT) to test the organization of autobiographical memories along the sagittal plane, using spatiotemporal interference. Twenty-one participants were asked to recall both episodic and semantic autobiographical memories (EAM and SAM, respectively) to be used in the SCT. Then, during the SCT, they were asked to decide whether each event occurred before or after the event presented right before, using a response code that could be compatible with the back-to-front axis (future in front) or not (future at back). We found that performance was significantly worse during the non-compatible condition, especially for EAM. The results are discussed in light of the evidence for spatiotemporal encoding of episodic autobiographical memories, taking into account possible mechanisms explaining compatibility effects.

Expectancy to Eat Modulates Cognitive Control and Attention Toward Irrelevant Food and Non-food Images in Healthy Starving Individuals. A Behavioral Study

It is thought that just as hunger itself, the expectancy to eat impacts attention and cognitive control toward food stimuli, but this theory has not been extensively explored at a behavioral level. In order to study the effect of expectancy to eat on attentional and cognitive control mechanisms, 63 healthy fasting participants were presented with an affective priming spatial compatibility Simon task that included both food and object (non-food) distracters. The participants (N = 63) were randomly assigned to two groups: an “immediate expectancy” group made up of participants who expected to eat immediately after the task (N = 31; females = 21; age = 26.8 ± 9.6) and a “delayed expectancy” cohort made up of individuals who expected to eat a few hours later (N = 32; females = 21; age = 25.0 ± 8.0). Slower reaction times (RTs) toward the food and non-food distracters and a more pronounced effect on the RTs in the incompatible condition [i.e., the Simon effect (SE)] were noted in both groups. The effect of the food and non-food distracters on the RTs was more pronounced in the immediate with respect to the delayed expectancy group. The magnitude of the SE for the food and the non-food distracters was also greater in the immediate with respect to the delayed expectancy group. These results seem to indicate that when the expectancy to eat is short, the RTs are delayed, and the SE is more pronounced when food and non-food distracters are presented. Instead, when the expectancy to eat is more distant, the distracters have less of an effect on the RTs and the correspondence effect is smaller. Our results suggest that the expectancy to eat can modulate both attention orienting and cognitive control mechanisms in healthy fasting individuals when distracting details are competing with information processing during goal directed behavior.

Imitation or Polarity Correspondence? Behavioural and Neurophysiological Evidence for the Confounding Influence of Orthogonal Spatial Compatibility on Measures of Automatic Imitation

During social interactions, humans tend to imitate one another involuntarily. To investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms driving this tendency, researchers often employ stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) tasks to assess the influence that action observation has on action execution. This is referred to as automatic imitation (AI). The stimuli used frequently in SRC procedures to elicit AI often confound action-related with other nonsocial influences on behaviour; however, in response to the rotated hand-action stimuli employed increasingly, AI partly reflects unspecific up-right/down-left biases in stimulus-response mapping. Despite an emerging awareness of this confounding orthogonal spatial-compatibility effect, psychological and neuroscientific research into social behaviour continues to employ these stimuli to investigate AI. To increase recognition of this methodological issue, the present study measured the systematic influence of orthogonal spatial effects on behavioural and neurophysiological measures of AI acquired with rotated hand-action stimuli in SRC tasks. In Experiment 1, behavioural data from a large sample revealed that complex orthogonal spatial effects exert an influence on AI over and above any topographical similarity between observed and executed actions. Experiment 2 reproduced this finding in a more systematic, within-subject design, and high-density electroencephalography revealed that electrocortical expressions of AI elicited also are modulated by orthogonal spatial compatibility. Finally, source localisations identified a collection of cortical areas sensitive to this spatial confound, including nodes of the multiple-demand and semantic-control networks. These results indicate that AI measured on SRC procedures with the rotated hand stimuli used commonly might reflect neurocognitive mechanisms associated with spatial associations rather than imitative tendencies.

Conditional effects of gaze on automatic imitation: the role of autistic traits

Establishing direct gaze has been shown to enhance the tendency to automatically imitate the other person’s actions, an effect that seems to be reduced in autism. Most previous studies, however, used experimental tasks that may have confounded the measurement of automatic imitation with spatial compatibility effects. This calls into question whether gaze cues regulate automatic imitation, or instead affect domain-general processes of response inhibition. Using a task that disentangled imitative from spatial compatibility effects, the current study re-examined the role of autistic traits on the modulation of automatic imitation by direct and averted gaze cues. While our results do not provide evidence for an overall significant influence of gaze on neither automatic imitation nor spatial compatibility, autistic traits were predictive of a reduced inhibition of imitative behaviour following averted gaze. Nonetheless, exploratory analyses suggested that the observed modulation by autistic traits may actually be better explained by the effects of concomitant social anxiety symptoms. In addition, the ethnicity of the imitated agent was identified as another potential modulator of the gaze effects on automatic imitation. Overall, our findings highlight the contextual nature of automatic imitation, but call for a reconsideration of the role of gaze on imitative behaviour.

Multicriteria Decision Tool for Sustainable Reuse of Industrial Heritage into Its Urban and Social Environment. Case Studies

Most of industrial heritage assets need new activities to ensure their survival. In addition, the collection of assets is very broad, many of their locations have now become central and are targets for speculation, and the nature of these sites displays great specialization. Consequently, processes for reusing these assets are necessary to conserve them, but they risk destroying features whose value has been inadequately identified. This work faces this multicriteria problem by adapting the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to create two independent criteria structures, one for heritage valuation and another for analyzing the spatial compatibility with new uses, and then connecting them considering the relations between criteria of both structures and the relevance of the heritage aspects involved. All this to select those activities that cause minimal harm to the heritage value to be conserved. This work analyses three case studies to evaluate the performance of a tool based on an adaptation of AHP. The results are exposed and some application guidelines are provided, since doubts in the way to applying and interpreting the criteria are in practice a common problem of this type of approaches and that is rarely addressed. Thus, this work shows the potential of the proposed tool as a resource for sustainable urban development strategies.

Spatial Compatibility of Implementing Nature-Based Solutions for Reducing Urban Heat Islands and Stormwater Pollution

Cities worldwide are facing several challenges connected to urbanization and climate change. Several cities have identified the implementation of nature-based solutions (NBS) as an option to mitigate several challenges at once. However, can two different aims be reached with NBS in the same location? This question has not yet been addressed. This paper discusses the spatial compatibility of NBS implementation strategies to tackle (1) urban heat island (UHI) effects and (2) water pollution at the same location. The evaluation is based on a spatial analysis of Berlin. We found a positive correlation of high UHI and median high stormwater pollution loads for zinc, total suspended solids, Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons and Terbutryn. Out of more than 14,000 building/street sections analyzed, 2270 showed spatial matching of high UHI and high stormwater pollution loads. In the majority of building/street sections, stormwater pollution was high for three out of the four parameters. We conclude that the compatibility of NBS implementation for both challenges depends both on the implementation strategies for NBS and on the specific NBS measures. Our spatial analysis can be used for further planning processes for NBS implementation.

No evidence for automatic response activation with target onset in the avatar-compatibility task

When people take the perspective of an avatar and perform a stimulus-response compatibility task, they generally show the same compatibility effects that are expected from the avatar’s position instead of their own. In this study, we investigated if these effects are caused by automatic response activation, a concept featured in dual-route models of stimulus-response compatibility. In two experiments we asked 24 participants each to perform a compatibility task from an avatar’s point of view. We introduced a delay between the presentation of the target and the avatar in half of the trials so that the participants had to wait until the avatar appeared to select the correct response. Because the automatic response activation is known to decay quickly, its influence is eliminated in this condition. In contrast to the prediction by the automatic response activation account, we observed a larger compatibility effect in the delayed condition with orthogonal (Experiment 1) and parallel (Experiment 2) stimulus-response pairings. Additionally, distributional analyses of the compatibility effects did not support the automaticity predictions. We conclude that these results call into question the role of automatic response activation for spatial compatibility in general and perspective-based compatibility effects in particular.