Further evidence that object-based correspondence effects are primarily modulated by object location not by grasping affordance

Abstract

Tipper, Paul and Hayes found object-based correspondence effects for door-handle stimuli for shape judgments but not colour. They reasoned that a grasping affordance is activated when judging dimensions related to a grasping action (shape), but not for other dimensions (colour). Cho and Proctor, however, found the effect with respect to handle position when the bases of the door handles were centred (so handles were positioned left or right; the base-centred condition) but not when the handles were centred (the object-centred condition), suggesting that the effect is driven by object location, not grasping affordance. We conducted an independent replication of Cho and Proctor's design, but with behavioural and event-related potential measures. Participants made shape judgments in Experiment 1 and colour judgments in Experiment 2 on the same door-handle objects. Correspondence effects on response time and errors were obtained in both experiments for the base-centred condition but not the object-centred condition. Effects were absent in the P1 and N1 data, which are consistent with the hypothesis of little binding between visual processing of grasping component and action. These findings question the grasping-affordance view but support a spatial-coding view, suggesting that correspondence effects are modulated primarily by object location.

Keywords:

• Correspondence effect
• Event-related potentials
• Object affordance
• Object-based
• Vision–action binding

Elliott Jardin is now at the joint program in the Psychology of Adult Development and Aging, Cleveland State University, USA and University of Akron, USA.

We thank Jos Adam, Eric Ruthruff and three anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. We also thank Andrew Morgan for providing technical support.

Elliott Jardin is now at the joint program in the Psychology of Adult Development and Aging, Cleveland State University, USA and University of Akron, USA.

We thank Jos Adam, Eric Ruthruff and three anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. We also thank Andrew Morgan for providing technical support.

Notes

¹ We thank one anonymous reviewer for suggesting this possibility.

² One anonymous reviewer suggests that including both left- and right-handed individuals could bias the grasping affordance effect. We believe that this bias was unlikely to be present in the current study since the correspondence effect was averaged across left and right hands for each participant. Therefore, participant's handedness should have little influence on the results. Nevertheless, we followed the reviewer's suggestion and analysed the data including only right-handed individuals (two were excluded from both Experiments 1 and 2). The results were very similar as the overall analyses reported in the main text. In Experiment 1, the critical three-way interaction between the display condition, object state and correspondence was still significant, F(1, 17) = 19.19, p < .001, . The correspondence effects were 16 ms and 30 ms for the active and passive objects, respectively, in the base-centred display condition and were −1 ms and −8 ms, respectively, in the object-centred display condition. Similarly, the three-way interaction was still significant in Experiment 2, F(1, 15) = 24.40, p < .001, . The correspondence effects were 19 ms and 35 ms for the active and passive objects, respectively, in the base-centred display condition and were −8 ms and −21 ms, respectively, in the object-centred display condition.