Conflict in the kitchen: Contextual modulation of responsiveness to affordances

• The immediate environment is able to influences the affordance-competition.
• Increased action readiness when objects correspond with the a priori appraisement of the environment.
• Enhanced response conflict when responses have to be withheld when the environment is congruent with an object.

Recently, human behavior has been considered the product of continuous interactions between perception, cognition and action in which “affordances” (action possibilities the environment has to offer) play an important role. Converging evidence suggests that multiple action possibilities simultaneously compete for further processing, while external and internal factors (e.g., incoming sensory information, predictions) bias this competition. In the present study we used a stop-task to investigate whether context is able to modulate the strength of the responsiveness to affordances. We therefore placed participants in an actual kitchen and workshop during electroencephalographic recordings. A faster response to context congruent objects demonstrated that the direct surrounding is able to affect responsiveness to affordances. In addition, when responses needed to be withheld, context congruent objects evoked greater response conflict as indicated by an enhanced N2 Event Related Potential (ERP) component.

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