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Bearded capuchin monkeys at Fazenda Boa Vista, Piauí, Brazil older than 8 years routinely crack palm nuts with a stone hammer and anvil. An embodied, perception–action stance hypothesizes that monkeys' improving skill at this task is enabled by learning affordances of spatial and force relations produced with objects. Affordances are individual-relative opportunities for action that may change across development. We evaluated predictions linking behaviours with nuts and stones and body mass to success at nut cracking in young bearded capuchins (1.3–6.3 years old) and adults over three annual observation periods. Behaviours with nuts and stones reflected the monkeys' learning affordances for cracking; body mass constrained affordances for cracking. For each period in which they were observed, individuals were assigned to novice, intermediate or expert classes in accord with their success at cracking nuts. Novices did not crack nuts, despite striking them with stones. Body mass was modestly associated with intermediates', but not experts', likelihood of cracking a nut. Experts exhibited higher proportions of manipulation devoted to positioning nuts on the anvil and shorter bouts of cracking than intermediates; intermediates exhibited greater variability in these variables than experts or novices. The strongest classification model predicting individuals' assignments to skill class with 89% accuracy combined average bout duration and the ratio of manipulation devoted to positioning to other manipulation. The findings suggest practise using the body-pus-tool system for cracking palm nuts supports affordance learning and results in gradual mastery of this skill and that changing body mass plays a small role in this process. • Most monkeys <7 years old did not have adult (expert) skill at cracking nuts. • Body mass had little to no effect on monkeys' skill at cracking nuts. • Experts cracked nuts in short bouts and relatively frequently positioned the nut. • Less skilled monkeys used long bouts and varied duration and action more over bouts. • Monkeys slowly learn affordances of the body-plus-tool system for nut cracking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • A fingerboard restrained the hand to suppress grasp affordances. • Target detection was facilitated near the palm of the hand. • Grasp affordances were not necessary to facilitate target detection near the hand. Abstract Observers show biases in attention when viewing objects within versus outside of their hands’ grasping space. While the hands’ proximity to stimuli plays a key role in these effects, recent evidence suggests an observer’s affordances for grasping actions also shape visual processing near the hands. The current study examined the relative contributions of proximity and affordances in introducing attentional biases in peripersonal space. Participants placed a single hand on a visual display and detected targets appearing near or far from the hand. Across conditions, the hand was either free, creating an affordance for a grasping action, or immobilized using an orthosis, interfering with the potential to grasp. Replicating previous findings, participants detected targets appearing near the hand more quickly than targets appearing far from the hand. Immobilizing the hands did not disrupt this effect, suggesting that proximity alone is sufficient to facilitate target detection in peripersonal space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyses of visibility have become a commonplace within landscape-based archaeological research, whether through rich description, simple mapping or formal modelling and statistical analysis, the latter increasingly carried out using the viewshed functionality of GIS. The research presented here challenges current obsessions with what is visible to focus instead upon the interpretative benefits of considering the invisible and the complex interplay of visibility and concealment that frequently accompany landscape movement and experience. Having highlighted the difficulties in analysing relational properties such as invisibility and hiding using traditional archaeological techniques, a series of new GIS methodologies are presented and evaluated in the context of an original study of a series of remarkably small, visually non-intrusive prehistoric megalithic monuments. The results serve to challenge dominant interpretations of these enigmatic sites as well as demonstrating the utility, value and potential of the GIS-based approaches developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Considers acoustic affordances as a complement to visibility and topographic dimensions of prominence. • Consideration of how acoustic exposure might have served to accentuate prominence of hillforts. • GIS-analysis of acoustic propagation in conjunction with visibility and mobility-based analyses. • Mapping of 'zones' where a trade-off in visual and acoustic propagation may have been a feature of landscape prominence. • Prominence and presence would have been unstable, ephemeral, losing and gaining potency with intensities of inhabitation. Prominent places were powerful places. The persistence and stability of prominent places typically depends upon the prioritisation of their physical and visual attributes. Yet if we are interested in the expression of prominence and power, then we should take account of the potential ways that places reached acoustically into the landscape. Acoustics complement visibility since sound like sight helps shape human experiences, memories and emotions. In this paper, we employ a geospatial framework where patterns of sound propagation are modelled and brought into conversation with visibility and mobility-based analyses often applied in geospatial studies of prominence. We apply our approach to a study of the Bryn-y-Castell hillfort in North West Wales. Geospatial studies, employing viewshed and least-cost modelling, examine how topographic and visual exposure might have accentuated the presence of hillforts. We demonstrate the analytical value of combining acoustic, visibility and mobility approaches in mapping zones in which a trade-off in visual and acoustic messages may have been a feature of how landscape prominence was expressed. The contribution of this study lies in challenging us to think, conceptually and methodologically, of prominence as something that varied, was ephemeral, and that lost and gained potency with intensities of inhabitation and landscape dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has established that people's resources and action capabilities influence visual perception, and for example, make hills appear more or less steep. What has remained unexamined, however, is whether perception also changes when an action is impending. We propose that when action is expected in an environment that is challenging because it poses high energetic costs, perceptual estimates are increased. Experiment 1 showed that motor movements of approach led to steeper slant estimates than motor movements of avoidance, but only if participants were in good physical condition and thus capable of undertaking costly actions. Experiment 2 used a mindset priming task and found that approach resulted in higher slant estimates than either avoidance, or a neutral control condition, again for participants who were in good, but not for those in poor physical condition. Experiment 3 further showed that the approach cue on its own had the same effect as when combined with instructions that climbing was involved, thus suggesting that approach manipulations indeed implied the action of climbing. However, the effect of approach disappeared when climbing was explicitly ruled out. We suggest that inflated perceptual visual estimates in the face of challenging environments are adaptive because they discourage future actions that may be costly to perform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Use and non-use of body parts during goal-directed action are major forces driving reorganisation of neural processing. We investigated changes in functional brain activity resulting from acute short-term immobilisation of the dominant right hand. Informed by the concept of object affordances, we predicted that the presence or absence of a limb restraint would influence the perception of graspable objects in a laterally specific way. Twenty-three participants underwent fMRI scanning during a passive object-viewing task before the intervention as well as with and without wearing an orthosis. The right dorsal premotor cortex and the left cerebellum were more strongly activated when the handle of an object was oriented towards the left hand while the right hand was immobilised compared with a situation where the hand was not immobilised. The cluster in the premotor cortex showing an interaction between condition (with restraint, without restraint) and stimulus action side (right vs. left) overlapped with the general task vs. baseline contrast prior to the intervention, confirming its functional significance for the task. These results show that acute immobilisation of the dominant right hand leads to rapid changes of the perceived affordance of objects. We conclude that changes in action requirements lead to almost instantaneous changes in functional activation patterns, which in turn may trigger structural cortical plasticity. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Direct touch manipulation interactions with technology are now commonplace and significant interest is building around their use in the culture and heritage domain. Such interactions can give people the opportunity to explore materials and artefacts in ways that would otherwise be unavailable. These are often heavily annotated and can be linked to a large array of related digital content, thus enriching the experience for the user. Research has addressed issues of how to present digital documents and their related annotations but at present it is unclear what the optimal interaction approach to navigating these annotations in a touch display context might be. In this paper we investigate the role of two alternative approaches to support the navigation of annotations in digitised documents in the context of a touch interface. Through a control study we demonstrate that, whilst the navigation paradigm displays a significant interaction with the type of annotations task performed, there is no discernible advantage of using a natural visual metaphor for annotation in this context. This suggests that design of digital document annotation navigation tools should account for the context and navigation tasks being considered. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Definitions of environmental child friendliness offer broad criteria that are not easy to study or assess. We suggest that due to this broadness, these definitions have produced surprisingly few attempts to evaluate how child-friendly various types of physical environments are. The purpose of this study is to analyse how the structure of the built environment contributes to environmental child friendliness. We define child friendliness by two central criteria: children's possibilities for independent mobility and their opportunities to actualize environmental affordances. We study how built environment qualities condition environmental child friendliness in place-based ways by asking children and youth in Turku, Finland, to tell about their meaningful places and their mobility to these. The data consists of over 12,000 affordances, localized by the respondents. This experiential and behavioural place-based knowledge is combined with objectively measured data on residential and building density, and quantity of green structures. Moderate urban density seems to have child-friendly characteristics such as an ability to promote independent access to meaningful places and the diversity of affordances. We find that affordances situated on residential areas are likely to be reached alone, whereas access to affordances situated in densely built urban cores is less independent. The proportion of green structures is not associated with independent access. The diversity of affordances is highest in areas that are densely populated and not very green. Green areas are important settings for doing things, and green structures around emotional affordances increase the likelihood of liking the place significantly. Combining children's place-based experiences with information derived from objective measurable qualities of the physical environment provides a valuable methodological contribution to studies on environmental child friendliness, and the two proposed criteria of child friendliness are supported by this study. There is no one environment that is child-friendly, but different environments have different uses and meanings. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The mental representation of one’s own body does not necessarily correspond to the physical body. For instance, a dissociation between perceived and actual reach-ability has been shown, that is, individuals perceive that they can reach objects that are out of grasp. We presented participants with 3D pictures of objects located at four different distances, namely near-reaching space, actual-reaching space, perceived-reaching space and non-reaching space. Immediately after they were presented with function, manipulation, observation or pointing verbs and were required to judge if the verb was compatible with the object. Participants were faster with function and manipulation verbs than with observation and pointing verbs. Strikingly, with both function and manipulation verbs participants were faster when objects were presented in actual than the perceived reaching space. These findings suggest that our knowledge of the world is implicitly built online through behaviour, and is not necessarily reflected in explicit estimates or conscious representations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Physically and psychologically, children demand special-purpose space for activities. With the fast urbanization and population growth in modern China, the conflict between the needs for economic development and human-friendly environment becomes increasingly prominent. The study adopts an in-depth ethnographic research method and applies the research framework of Sudeshna to investigate children’s environmental friendliness of a hutong community in Beijing. The study investigated spatial preferences of those children and the characteristics and affordance of their space. This study suggests that different emotional dimensions demand different spatial attributes, which are lacking in the hutong community. The results show that in China’s historical residential areas, children’s environmental and spatial needs remain unfulfilled. The researchers suggest that improving specific environmental affordance could help enhance the overall child-friendliness. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Are wild bearded capuchin monkeys selective about where they place nuts on anvils, specifically the anvil pits, during nut cracking? In the present study, we examined (1) whether capuchins’ preferences for particular pits are influenced by the effectiveness of the pit in cracking the nut and/or by the stability of the nut during striking, (2) how capuchins detect the affordances of novel pits and (3) the influence of social context on their selections. Anvil pits varied in horizontal dimension (small, medium and large) in experiment 1 and in depth (shallow, medium and deep) in experiment 2. In both experiments, three different pits were simultaneously presented, each on one anvil. We coded the capuchins’ actions with the nut in each pit, and recorded the outcome of each strike. In both experiments, capuchins preferred the most effective pit, but not the most stabilizing pit, based on the number of first strikes, total strikes and nuts cracked. Their choice also reflected where the preceding individual had last struck. The capuchins explored the pits indirectly, placing nuts in them and striking nuts with a stone. The preference for pits was weaker than the preference for nuts and stones shown previously with the same monkeys. Our findings suggest that detecting affordances of pits through indirect action is less precise than through direct action, and that social context may also influence selection. We show that field experiments can demonstrate embodied cognition in species-typical activities in natural environments. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Although there is a debate about whether designers should draw a distinction between perceptual affordances and cultural conventions, there are few behavioral studies. We examined the impact of working memory load and expected button-to-action mapping congruency on affordances and conventions. The findings suggest both sides of the debate are correct. Learned conventions were found to structure responses towards expected actions, just like affordances, but affordance-based interactions were not affected by memory load while convention-based actions were. Therefore, designers ought to employ perceptual affordances when possible and when not feasible they ought to reuse established conventions. Additionally, evidence is presented that violating expected affordance-based and convention-based button-to-action mappings caused a similar performance cost. We believe that after the initial learning period, conventions play a critical role in the perception of a design’s available actions just as perceptual affordances do. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Does the sight of multiple climbing holds laid along a path activate a motor simulation of climbing that path? One way of testing whether multiple affordances and their displacement influence the formation of a motor simulation is to study acquired motor skills. We used a behavioral task in which expert and novice rock climbers were shown three routes: an easy route, a route impossible to climb but perceptually salient, and a difficult route. After a distraction task, they were then given a recall test in which they had to write down the sequence of holds composing each route. We found no difference between experts and novices on the easy and impossible routes, whereas on the difficult route, the performance of experts was better than that of novices. This suggests that seeing a climbing wall activates a motor, embodied simulation, which relies not on perceptual salience, but on motor competence. More importantly, our results show that the capability to form this simulation is modulated by individuals’ motor repertoire and expertise, and that this strongly impacts recall. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Two experiments are reported in which groups of three friends socialised around their own photographs. The photographs were of two types, depicting events where all three had been present, permitting reminiscing, and events where only the photographer had been present, permitting storytelling. In Experiment 1 the seating arrangement was manipulated so that the two audience members sat either behind or around the photographer. It was hypothesised that the former would lower levels of peripheral awareness within the groups, resulting in a more formal conversation and a poorer recreational experience. In Experiment 2, control over the photographs was manipulated so that either all three group members had access to a remote control (distributed control), or only the photographer did (single control). It was hypothesised that distributed control would result in less formal conversations and a better recreational experience. In both experiments, the hypotheses were supported: patterns of social interaction were significantly affected by the manipulation of awareness during storytelling, and by the manipulation of control during reminiscing. Additionally, the two manipulations were found to affect ratings of enjoyment and fun, respectively. The results are interpreted in terms of a causative model of unfolding and recounted experience. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Both animal and human studies suggest that the efficiency with which we are able to grasp objects is attributable to a repertoire of motor signals derived directly from vision. This is in general agreement with the long-held belief that the automatic generation of motor signals by the perception of objects is based on the actions they afford. In this study, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to determine the spatial distribution and temporal dynamics of brain regions activated during passive viewing of object and non-object targets that varied in the extent to which they afforded a grasping action. Synthetic Aperture Magnetometry (SAM) was used to localize task-related oscillatory power changes within specific frequency bands, and the time course of activity within given regions-of-interest was determined by calculating time–frequency plots using a Morlet wavelet transform. Both single subject and group-averaged data on the spatial distribution of brain activity are presented. We show that: (i) significant reductions in 10–25 Hz activity within extrastriate cortex, occipito-temporal cortex, sensori-motor cortex and cerebellum were evident with passive viewing of both objects and non-objects; and (ii) reductions in oscillatory activity within the posterior part of the superior parietal cortex (area Ba7) were only evident with the perception of objects. Assuming that focal reductions in low-frequency oscillations (<30 Hz) reflect areas of heightened neural activity, we conclude that: (i) activity within a network of brain areas, including the sensori-motor cortex, is not critically dependent on stimulus type and may reflect general changes in visual attention; and (ii) the posterior part of the superior parietal cortex, area Ba7, is activated preferentially by objects and may play a role in computations related to grasping. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, I offer a discussion concerning the conceptual connection between the notion of vision-for-action and the one of affordance perception. I first analyze the notion of vision-for-action. I then analyze a notion usually coupled with it: the notion of affordance perception , the main insights behind which are guiding several current neuroscientific enterprises and the related philosophical speculations. Then, I argue that we should not couple these two notions with a light heart: though these two processes can be, from a theoretical point of view, related, we should be careful in inferring the actual and effective occurrence of the latter in the presence of the former. This will be done by carrying out a conceptual analysis of the experimental evidence coming from the ' Two Visual Systems Model ', which is the main reference in the literature on affordance perception and vision-for-action. My point has strong philosophical implications for our view concerning the best interpretation of how vision-for-action really works, and the specific relation it actually entertains with affordance perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Skeuomorphism and flat design are not different to afford a user's actions at the perceptuomotor level. • The design styles are muddled with dimensionality and visual metaphor. • Visuo-perceptual familiarity is more critical to afford a user's actions than dimensionality. • A design physically compatible with user manipulation is more important for affording a user's actions than a real-world metaphor. • Using a conventional metaphor as a signifier can increase a user's ability to perceive how they can interact with interfaces. Skeuomorphism and flat design, which are the most prevalent design styles, have both striven for supremacy in interface design. A consensus has not been reached due to inconsistent findings in academia and groundless arguments on the internet. In this article, we aim to explore perceptuomotor differences between these two design styles via object-based correspondence effects. Experiments with object-based correspondence effects allow the affordance to be measured quantitatively, comparing both perceptual and operational aspects of each design style. In Experiment 1, the two design styles are compared in terms of the correspondence effect between handle-orientation (left/right) and a user's responding hand (right hand/left hand). In Experiment 2, the two design styles are compared in terms of the correspondence effect between object size (big/small) and grip type (power grip/precision grip). The results in both experiments indicate that the two design styles are not different at the perceptuomotor level. This demonstrates that an affordance is similarly evoked in digital objects designed with either skeuomorphism or flat design. Further, we discuss the reason for the inconsistent findings in previous research, concluding that results have been influenced by unfamiliar forms and inappropriate real-world metaphors. Based on the conclusions, we suggest three design principles that designers can use to avoid confusion related to the design styles. In our discussion, we determine that the design styles are muddled with dimensionality and metaphor, which increases the inconsistent research findings in the literature. Finally, we suggest that the dichotomy between skeuomorphism and flat design is discarded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]