Synthese

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02049-w

S.I.: BETWEEN VISION AND ACTION

Intensional biases in affordance perception: an explanatory

issue for radical enactivism

Silvano Zipoli Caiani1

Received: 31 January 2018 / Accepted: 3 December 2018

© Springer Nature B.V. 2018

Abstract
Radical Enactivism holds that the best explanation of basic forms of cognition is pro-
vided without involving information of any sort. According to this view, the ability
to perceive visual affordances should be accounted for in terms of extensional covari-
ations between variables spanning the agent’s body and the environment. Contrary
to Radical Enactivism, I argue that the intensional properties of cognition cannot be
ignored, and that the way in which an agent represents the world has consequences
on the explanation of basic sensorimotor abilities. To support this claim, I show that
the perception of visual affordances is not segregated from higher forms of cognition;
rather, it is modulated by the agent’s ability to recognize the semantic identity of the
visual target. Accordingly, since the semantic recognition of an object involves a way
of representing it under a certain description, it can be inferred that the perception
of visual affordances cannot be accounted for without considering the intensional
properties of cognition. This poses an explanatory issue for Radical Enactivism.

Keywords Visual affordance · Intensionality · Basic cognition · Radical enactivism

1 Introduction

Over the past decade, the enactive approach to cognition has gained increasing con-
sensus among scholars in fields such as philosophy, experimental psychology, and
neuroscience, spurring a lively debate about the ontology and methodology of the
cognitive sciences (e.g., Thompson 2007; Di Paolo 2009; Chemero 2011; Bruineberg
and Rietveld 2014; Gallagher 2017; Hutto and Myin 2012, 2017). At the core of the
enactive view is the idea that basic cognition can be defined by focusing on the dynam-
ical coupling of bodily and environmental properties, whereas internal representations
and information processing are of secondary or no importance. Contrary to this view,

B Silvano Zipoli Caiani

silvano.zipolicaiani@unifi.it

1 Università degli Studi di Firenze, Firenze, Italy

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my aim is to show that how an agent represents the world has consequences all the
way down to basic sensorimotor abilities.
At present, there are at least three main theoretical variants of the enactive view of
cognition. The first variant, also known as autopoietic enactivism, is inspired by the
work of Francisco Varela (e.g., Maturana and Varela 1991). According to autopoietic
enactivism, cognition is grounded in the dynamics of biological life, insofar as the
structures of the mind are nothing but evolved versions of the structures grounding
life itself. Autopoietic enactivists hold the view that interactions between organisms
and environment are guided by a teleological sense-making which allows an agent to
identify salience in the surrounding environment.
The second variant, also known as sensorimotor enactivism, is associated with the
works of Alva Noë and Kevin O’Regan (e.g., Noë 2004; O’Regan and Noë 2001;
O’Regan 2011). Sensorimotor enactivism is mainly an attempt to explain the phe-
nomenal and intentional properties of perception in terms of exploratory activities
and interactions with the environment. Sensorimotor enactivists propose to account
for perceptual cognition by appealing to patterns of movements and perceptual fea-
tures called sensorimotor contingences, without involving the construction of an inner
snapshot of the visual field.
The third variant of enactivism, also known as radical enactivism, is mainly related
to the works of Daniel Hutto and Erick Myin (e.g., Hutto and Myin 2012, 2017). Radi-
cal enactivism rejects the traditional representational–computational view of cognition
in favor of conceiving minds in terms of the extensional and dynamical patterns of
interactions between the brain, body, and environment.
These three variants share the idea that the computational modeling of cognition is
basically incorrect, and that a fundamental reinterpretation of the relationship between
cognition, action, and environment is required. According to these views, the tradi-
tional boundaries between perception, emotion, and action should be abandoned, and
a more embodied and situated way of conceiving cognition should be considered.
Despite these alternatives share an anti-representationalist stance toward modeling
and explaining mental phenomena, there are important differences among them (see
also Ward et al. 2017).
For the sake of the present argument, the most relevant difference between autopoi-
etic, sensorimotor, and radical enactivism is that only the latter involves a crucial
distinction between contentless basic cognitive abilities and content-involving higher
forms of cognition. According to radical enactivism (thereafter RE), basic cognitive
abilities such as perception, imagination, and action execution can be conceived as
extensional interactions spanning the agent’s brain, body, and environment (e.g., Hutto
and Myin 2012). Because basic abilities are conceived extensionally, they do not
involve “the picking up and processing of information that is used, reused, stored, and
represented in the brain” (Hutto and Myin 2017, p. ivx); instead, they can be under-
stood as object-involving dynamical covariations between the physical parameters
of the agent–environment system (§3). By contrast, higher forms of cognition, such
as action planning, inferential reasoning, and semantic categorization, are conceived
intensionally, that is, as forms of representation based on informational contents.
To sum up, the main difference between the basic and higher forms of cogni-
tion is that the former is merely based on extensional interactions and does not rely

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on information storing and processing, whereas the latter involves intensional com-
prehension based on categorization abilities. According to Hutto and Myin (2017),
“content-involving cognition has special properties not found elsewhere in nature”;
thus, “minds capable of contentful thought differ in kind, in this key respect, from
more basic minds” (p. 136), and “basic minds target, but do not contentfully repre-
sent, specific objects and states of affairs” (p. 92).
Based on this distinction, RE has relevant consequences regarding how vision
interfaces with action. Because RE considers vision for action an instance of basic
cognition, it should be accounted for without involving contentful states and infor-
mation processing. Notably, supporters of RE refer to vision for action as a relevant
case of dynamical and extensional interaction between the agent and the environment,
the explanation of which does not require reference to higher mental abilities (e.g.,
Hutto and Myin 2017; Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014). According to RE, the perceiving
agents can track, detect, and interact with the action-related features of the environ-
ment without involving intellectual sense-making, namely, without representing the
world in a way rather than another (Hutto and Myin 2017, pp. 78–79). This means RE
conceives the abilities to perceive and interact with action possibilities as instances of
basic cognition, that is, as “dynamically loopy processes that are responsive to infor-
mation in the form of environmental variables spanning multiple temporal and spatial
scales” (Hutto and Myin 2017 p. 9).
Interestingly, Hutto and Myin (2017, p. 85–86) maintain that a careful analysis of
affordance perception must be understood in a contentless sense, without the need
for contamination with “obfuscating” forms of cognitivism (p. 86).1 More precisely,
representational cognitivism (thereafter RC) assumes that the cognitive system forms
intensional representations of the available opportunities in the environment, the pro-
cessing of which has a causal role in action planning and execution (e.g., Mcculloch
and Pitts 1944; Fodor 1980; Searle 1983; Pacherie 2008), RE conceives the interaction
between vision and action as an extensional covariation of bodily and environmen-
tal variables. According to RE, modeling the relationships between vision and action
requires attending to how individuals engage with certain worldly offerings by means
of dynamical interactions (Hutto and Myin 2017); thus, RE assumes that visually per-
ceiving opportunities for action does not involve the detecting, storing, and processing
of information in the brain. By contrast, RE conceives vision for action as a basic cog-
nitive ability that can be modeled by means of an extensional semantics referring to
bodily and environmental variables.
Considering this perspective, because basic cognition does not involve represen-
tational processing of any sort, the explanation of such a type of phenomena should
not involve intensional entities, such as mental contents and conceptual categories.
Hence, if the ability to perceive the action opportunities is a form of basic cognition,
1 It should be noted that, at least prima facie, this view resembles that of Gibson (1979), according to
which action opportunities or affordances do not depend on the animal’s categorization and intention to act
(p. 134). However, it is important to note that the agreement between Gibson’s ecological psychology and
RE concerns only the non-representational nature of internal cognition, whereas they diverge regarding the
existence of environmental information. Notably, Gibson (1979) and his fellows (e.g., Turvey et al. 1981)
have stated that the agent’s actions are guided by the information in the environment, but not in the brain,
whereas radical enactivists deny any presence of information in the brain and environment. I’m grateful to
an anonymous reviewer for bringing this relevant distinction to my attention.

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it should be explained extensionally, that is, by using a non-representational approach

to cognition. This amounts to an assumption that at the basic level of the interaction
between vision and action, the agent and environment form an extensional system, the
behavior of which can be modeled without involving causal chains linking content-
ful states (Chemero 2011). Consequently, the interlocking between vision and action
should be explained by using a methodological tool that does not posit the internal
processing of intensional information, such as the dynamical system theory (DST) for
cognitive science (van Gelder 1995; Beer 2000; Spivey 2008, see §3 for details).2
To sum up, one of the main tenets of RE is that basic cognition is a world involving
extensional process, the explanation of which does not require referencing intensional
contents and conceptual categories. Notably, advocates of RE rely on the methodologi-
cal resources of DST to account for the visual perception of affordances in a contentless
manner (Hutto and Myin 2017, pp. 23–26). Contrary to this view, this paper argues
that RE has insufficient theoretical resources to achieve the goal of providing a mere
extensional account of vision for action. My argument is based on the evidence that
perceiving spatial relations and interacting with action opportunities involves higher
cognitive abilities usually considered beyond the reach of the extensional modeling
of cognition. To support this claim, the paper has four sections. Section 2 introduces
the explanatory thesis of RE, according to which accounting for basic forms of cog-
nition does not imply information processing of any sort. Section 3 considers how
the methodological tools of DST can be used to account for the case of affordance
perception. Section 4 demonstrates that detecting and selecting affordances in the envi-
ronment requires semantic abilities that pertain to higher forms of cognition. Finally, I
conclude that because the visual perception of affordances requires semantic abilities,
it involves the intensional categorization of the visual target and, therefore, cannot be
considered a mere extensional form of cognition.
This conclusion poses an explanatory problem for RE as introduced and supported
by Hutto and Myin (2012, 2017). Notably, either it is possible to provide a dynamical
and extensional account of the intensionality involved in affordance perception or
affordance perception cannot be explained extensionally. In the latter case, RE would
be unable to account for a crucial aspect of the interaction between vision and action,
whereas in the former case, RE should address that, at present, there are no suitable
extensional explanations of intensional, semantic abilities.

2 The explanatory thesis of RE

According to RE, the ability to visually perceive affordances in the environment is a

form of basic cognition, and the explanation of this ability does not involve higher
cognitive capacities such as categorization and semantic recognition (Hutto and Myin
2012, 2017). According to this view, perceiving affordances amounts to dynamical
engagement with the environment that does not require any role for content manip-
ulation. Consequently, the evidence concerning the visual perception of affordances

2 Mathematical tools of DST have been adopted in several naturalistic disciplines, including physics,
biology, neuroscience, and behavioral psychology (e.g., Guastello and Gregson 2011).

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should be fully and satisfactorily explained without relying on content involving com-
putational accounts.
To promote the perspective that vision for action does not involve computations,
there are at least two theoretical strategies that an advocate of RE can endorse. On the
one hand, one might be interested in making a claim regarding what is basic cognition;
on the other hand, one might be interested in claiming something about the best method
to explain the interactions between vision and action. While in the former case, the
rebuttal of the computational view amounts to an ontological thesis, in the latter, it
rests on an explanatory thesis.
The key difference between the ontological and explanatory theses is that the former
concerns theoretical criteria, whereas the latter is an empirical hypothesis regarding
the power to account for evidence in cognitive science (see also Chemero 2011).
Notably, according to the ontological thesis, RC cannot be explanatory because the
Hard Problem of Content (hereafter HPC) has not been solved (Hutto and Myin 2012).
In essence, HPC is an issue that occurs when attempting to make the existence of the
informational contents compatible with our knowledge of the natural world (e.g.,
Dretske 1981; Millikan 1989; Papineau 1987). Notably, the inconsistence between
content involving explanations and the natural sciences depends on the adoption of an
ontological form of naturalism, according to which any admissible explanation must
refer to the entities postulated by our basic natural sciences (e.g., physics). In other
words, HPC shows its relevance just because it is assumed that mental contents must
be part of the naturalistic furniture of the world; otherwise, they couldn’t have the
explanatory power usually attributed to them. Accordingly, if there is no conclusive
argument showing that informational contents are identical or reducible to basic natural
entities, an assumption might be there is no reason to consider RC capable of providing
explanations of cognitive phenomena (e.g., Hutto and Myin 2017 pp. 45–49).3
However, the case could be that RC fails to provide a satisfactory account of the
available evidence, and that RC might be considered the best explanation of certain
cognitive phenomena such as the perception of affordances, despite that the puzzle
underlying HPC has not yet been solved. Certainly, a method to avoid troubles with
the HPC is to adopt an antirealist take on the nature of content-involving accounts.
As has been suggested in the literature, the existence of informational contents is
not a necessary condition for the assumption of theoretical entities such as mental
representations as legitimate explanatory tools (see Colombo 2014). This amounts
to endorsing a form of methodological naturalism instead of a form of ontological
naturalism to save the explanatory power of contentful minds, without engaging with
the metaphysical reality of such peculiar entities (e.g., McDowell 1996; Hornsby 2001;
De Caro and Macarthur 2008; Floridi 2017).
To resume, because HPC is strictly committed to a form of ontological natural-
ism, it loses its cogency within a methodological framework. Indeed, according to the
methodological view of naturalism, the ontological status of a certain entity and its
explanatory power are not strictly related, so that a theoretical entity can have explana-
tory functions, although it does not have the status of a real object in a metaphysical

3 It should be noted that this view involves endorsing a metaphysical approach to scientific explanation,
according to which only metaphysically true statements can be genuine explanations (e.g. Psillos 2005).

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sense. Following this move, content-involving accounts of cognition can be method-

ologically justified without entailing that those who accept and use them are thereby
committed to a metaphysical doctrine (Carnap 1955, 1960; Dennett 1987; Horst 2009,
2011). In such a case, RE and RC can equally provide compelling explanations of
vision for action.4
Nevertheless, RE scientists can continue to argue for the explanatory thesis as long
as the dynamical account is actually complete and explaining affordance perception
does not require further reference to the processing of mental contents. As an alternative
to the content-involving account of cognition, the supporters of RE state that the math-
ematical tools of DST allow for a contentless explanation of affordance perception,
whereas RC should be discarded since it does not add anything to our understanding
that is not already included in the dynamical account. In other words, according to RE,
once the full dynamical story is provided, we can predict and explain the behavior of
the agent in its environment, without the need to refer to content-involving models of
cognition (e.g., van Gelder 1995). Accordingly, supporters of RE must determine how
much evidence concerning vision for action can be explained by using DST, and then
they have to show that no representational glosses are required to achieve this aim.
In the remainder of the paper, I argue that RE is unable to provide a fully-fledged
account for all evidence concerning vision for action. To achieve this aim, after intro-
ducing the methodological tools of DST to account for affordance perception, I argue
that a purely extensional approach is insufficient. Indeed, evidence concerning the
recruitment of higher cognition in vision for action shows that visually perceiving
action opportunities is not a so basic ability as usually thought (§4). Notably, several
experimental results can be used to show that the detection and selection of affordances
is modulated by the agent’s ability to semantically recognize the identity of the visual
targets. That is, vision for action is not segregated from a higher form of cognition
and, therefore, does not pertain to a basic form of cognition.

3 The extensional modeling of visual affordance

The methodological tools provided by DST have recently attracted the attention of an
increasing number of philosophers and cognitive scientists. As, according to RE, basic
cognitive abilities are not grounded in the processing of intensional states (Hutto and
Myin 2017), DST provides just the right extensional language that is not committed
to the postulation of mental symbols and ways of representing (see also Chemero
2011). DST rests on the Equal Partner Principle by providing an account of the
agent’s behavior that does not discriminate between internal and external resources,
but conceives extensionally the agent and environment relation as a coupled dynamical
system (Hutto and Myin 2017, chapter. 2). Accordingly, DST may appear to be the
perfect methodological partner for RE because it employs mathematical tools to predict
and explain how such an extensional system behaves over time (e.g., van Gelder 1995;
Heinke 2000; Spivey 2008; Hutto and Myin 2017, p. 22).

4 This paper mainly focuses on the explanatory thesis underlying RE and does not address the HPC. In
doing this, I agree with Chemero (2011), according to which, the explanatory and the ontological problems
of RE can be addressed independently of one another.

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This methodological approach begins by selecting relevant variables that describe

the state of a system at a point in time; then, it traces the trajectory of the system’s
behavior through a space of possibilities (i.e., the phase space), according to dynamical
rules (e.g., Chow et al. 2015; Davids et al. 2007). The adoption of DST to explain
cognitive abilities relies on a general strategy that can be summarized as follows:
“First, observe patterns of macroscopic behavior; then seek collective variables (like
relative phase) and parameters (like rate) that govern the behavior; finally, search for
the simplest mathematical function that accounts for the behavior” (Chemero 2011,
p. 88).
From an explanatory point of view, the adoption of DST in cognitive sciences offers
arguments based on the fine-grained analysis of the covariation of selected bodily
and environmental parameters (Walmsley 2008). According to this view, “If mod-
els are accurate enough to describe observed phenomena and to predict what would
have happened had circumstances been different, they are sufficient as explanations”
(Chemero and Silberstein 2008, p. 12). For example, it is possible to account for evi-
dence concerning the dynamics of the relative phase between two oscillating fingers
under frequency scaling by means of the Haken–Kelso–Bunz model (thereafter HKB)
of motor coordination by using just the mathematical tools of DST (Haken et al. 1985).
According to HKB, the relative phase can be defined by means of a simple equation,
according to which the measure of the phase value is a function of the inverse of the
oscillation frequency. The HKB model has the power to predict several observable
variables, for example, as the frequency rate increases, agents are unable to maintain
out-of-phase performance, and behavior exhibits critical fluctuations as the frequency
rate approaches a critical value (Fuchs and Jirsa 2008). Therefore, because the occur-
rence of such events is predictable by means of the HKB model, the mathematical tools
of DST can be properly conceived as providing an explanation of observable variables
referring to fine-grained nomological covariation between relevant parameters of the
system.
Over the last few decades, DST has been also endorsed in the cognitive science of
vision to account for the manner in which agents perceive and interact with affordances
in the environment. Notably, DST provides the tools to construe the perception of
affordances as a form of dynamical interaction between features of the environment, the
relevant motor properties, and the dynamics of the agent’s body. Indeed, DST allows
for the study of the perception of affordances extensionally, by means of mathematical
correlations between environmental parameters and the relevant variables concerning
the agent’s body and his/her motor possibilities (e.g., Harrison et al. 2016; Lopresti-
Goodman et al. 2011; Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014; Chemero 2011).
The first step toward providing a dynamical and extensional understanding of
affordance perception is to conceive affordances relationally, that is, as possible or
actual interactions between the agents and aspects of their environment. In agreement
with this concept, DST has been adopted as an explanatory tool for the behavioral
effects related to the perception and interaction with visual affordances. For example,
according to a paradigmatic experiment performed by Warren (1984), the π-number
characterizing the system constituted by a passage with an extension X, say a door,
and an agent with a shoulder width of Y (π  X/Y) has critical relevance to whether an
individual may perceive the possibility of walking through such an aperture. Indeed,

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systems characterized by π > 1 will be facilitated in passing through the aperture in

comparison to systems with π < 1. Based on this phenomenon, because π-numbers
specify distinctive motor conditions, they allow for an explanation of the likelihood
that a certain action will occur. Similar results have been found for visual estimation of
crossable gaps (Jiang and Mark 1994), regarding the judgment of optimal sitting height
(Mark 1987; Mark and Vogele 1987) and the assessment of maximal reaching distance
(e.g., Carello et al. 1989). More recently, Lopresti-Goodman et al. (2011, 2013) used
DST to explain how agents judge whether a visible object requires grasping with one
or both hands. Their results showed that the transition between manual modes depends
on ratios between the measures of specific properties of the environment-body system
and on contextual cues, such as the nature of the task and arrangement of the visual
stimuli (see also, Kim and Frank 2016).
From a neural point of view, the dynamical systems approach to neuroscience
provides a suitable framework to understand how the perception of possible motor
interactions with a visual target can be modeled in terms of brain activity without
involving the attribution of representational roles. According to the dynamical neuro-
science view, the functions of the brain can be described by nonlinear systems that map
the dynamical changes of the nervous apparatus because of their relation to salient
properties in the visual field. Several neuroscientists have already utilized DST across
scales of inquiry, from single cell recording to the modeling of visuomotor patterns
of neural activation (e.g., Balduzzi and Tononi 2008; Favela 2014; Loh et al. 2007;
Poil et al. 2008; Spivey 2008). Among others, Michael Anderson has provided fresh
arguments to clarify the dynamical nature of the brain activity. According to Ander-
son (2014), the visual interaction with an environment offering multiple possibilities
of action causes several areas of the central nervous system to be variably activated
depending on the values of the parameters that characterize the neural network. Thus,
a reasonable expectation is that the visual interaction with an environment that allows
several possible courses of action would be correlated to distributed patterns of neural
activation across the nervous system. Accordingly, the visual perception of affor-
dances and their related motor interactions are ultimately determined by such patterns
of brain activity, the occurrences of which can be predicted and explained by using the
mathematical tools of DST. Following this line of thought, the visuomotor patterns of
activity in the premotor areas (see for example, Gentilucci et al. 1988; Raos et al. 2006;
Stark et al. 2007; Chao and Martin 2000) can be viewed as the complement to specific
action-related properties of the visual targets (de Wit et al. 2017). So conceived, the
visuomotor function of the brain can be modeled extensionally as part of a coupled
system of dynamical covariations, linking the agent’s neural activity to relevant fea-
tures of the environment by means of the methodological resources provided by DST
(Anderson 2014).
Several papers have attempted to include into the dynamical model of affordances
the cultural conventions that characterize a social environment (e.g., Bruineberg and
Rietveld 2014; Ramstead et al. 2016; van Dijk and Rietveld 2016). Although not all
the issues concerning the nature of socio-cultural affordances can be extended to the
notion of affordance in general, the role of conventions in enabling perception and
interaction with possibilities of action is relevant for the sake of the present argument.
Rietveld and Kiverstein (2014), for instance, argued that agents that inhabit a social

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and cultural environment have a far richer system of possibilities of action. According
to these authors, the opportunities for action available in the socio-cultural landscape
are related to the whole spectrum of practical meanings allowed by socio-cultural
practices (Heft 2001). This amounts to an enormous richness of opportunities, which
raises the question of how a certain agent can be responsive to only a small subset of
extant affordances in a given situation. According to Rietveld (2008), an affordance
can be relevant for an agent depending on the current concerns of the agent and
the situation he/she is in: some affordances are experienced as immediately relevant
for action, whereas others can be ignored (see also Withagen et al. 2012). It is thus
possible to distinguish between affordances that are available given a specific agent
and affordances that are not available to him or her.
In light of this, a lively interest has emerged around the following question: what
makes an affordance among others available to a specific agent? This question is of
importance because the environment presents cognitive agents at all times with mul-
tiple opportunities of actions; thus, an individual must be able to select which of the
available affordances is suitable for his/her actual skills and goals. Accordingly, a
satisfactory account of affordance perception and interaction should provide an expla-
nation of how agents detect and select among multiple possibilities of actions in the
environment (see also Cisek 2007; Anderson 2014; Zipoli Caiani and Ferretti 2017). In
other words, the concern is which variables are involved in allowing affordance detec-
tion and selection and whether they are fully accountable within a purely extensional
framework.
Before providing an answer to this question, let me take stock. In this section, I
argued that supporters of RE adopt DST as the methodological tool to provide an
extensional understating of vision for action in terms of the actual or possible interac-
tions with the environment. Following this view, at the behavioral level, the perception
of affordances can be explained by means of the correlations between parameters per-
taining to the environment and the agent’s disposition to behave in a certain way (e.g.,
Mark 1987; Lopresti-Goodman et al. 2013; Kim and Frank 2016). Similarly, at the
neural level, the perception of affordances can be extensionally modeled as a function
of the dynamical covariation between the distributed patterns of neural activation of
the agent’s brain and action-related features of the environment (e.g., Anderson 2014;
de Wit et al. 2017).
Moreover, it should be noted that modelling affordance detection and selection in
terms of the nomological coupling between the brain, body, and environment fits with
the idea that the explanation of vision for action does not require the reference to rep-
resentations and computations. Remarkably, this very idea is at the core of the radical
enactivist view by Hutto and Myin, according to which, those who favor RE “seek
to explain skilled performance in terms of embodied activity that involves dynamic
processes that span brain, body, and environment. Accordingly, cognitive processes
are not, for example, conceived of as mechanisms that exist only inside individuals.
Instead they are identified with nothing short of bouts of extensive, embodied activity

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that take the form of more or less successful organism-environment couplings” (Hutto
and Myin 2017, p. 25).
Over the last decade, however, theoretical considerations and empirical results
have converged, demonstrating that perceiving affordances requires the possession of
discrimination abilities that are not universally shared among agents. This brings us
back to the previous question: what makes an agent sensible to the available affordances
in the environment, while other agents are not?

4 Intensional categorization in affordance perception

The capacity to detect and select opportunities of action in the environment is not
universally shared among agents, because they may have different attitudes toward
the same visual targets. Notably, neurobiological and behavioral findings have shown
that the detection and selection of action possibilities vary according to the agent’s
intentions and motor expertise.
From a neural point of view, for example, Creem-Regehr and Lee (2005) showed
that the activation of motor-related areas of the brain during visual perception is influ-
enced by the functional meaning of the visual target for the agent. Indeed, although
viewing tools for which the practical function is unknown does not elicit the acti-
vation of motor areas, this is not the case if the agent has the intention to execute a
specific action with them. In this case, the visual perception of the same tool elicits the
activation of the motor regions of the brain involved in the execution of the intended
action.
Moreover, the literature has indicated that the activation of brain regions during the
visual perception of tools is modulated by the familiarity of the agent with the func-
tionality of the perceived tool. For example, Vingerhoets (2008) measured the brain
activity of fourteen right-handed subjects with functional magnetic resonance imaging
while presenting them with images of types of tools, such as common household and
office utensils as well as specialized instruments used by craftsmen and mechanics.
The results showed that several regions of the left parietal cortex present increased
activation with the visual perception of familiar tools, compared with that elicited
by the visual perception of unfamiliar tools (see also Kiefer et al. 2007; Vingerhoets
et al. 2009). This finding permitted Vingerhoets (2008) to hypothesize that the parietal
regions are particularly related to pre-existing tool knowledge, and that their activation
during visual tasks can be modulated by the agent’s practical expertise.
Bellebaum et al. (2013) verified this hypothesis by assessing brain activity during
the visual observation of unfamiliar tools, before and after subjects received specific
trainings on how to use them. The subjects were instructed to acquire confidence with
unfamiliar tools by means of two types of training: one set of objects was actively
manipulated, and another set was visually explored, while information about object
function was provided for both sets. The results show that, after training, images
of unfamiliar tools elicit greater activity relative to pre-training in a fronto-parietal
network, an area crucially involved in the selection of sensory contents by visual
attention. More precisely, a specific increase in activations was observed in the left
inferior-middle frontal cortex and in the left posterior inferior parietal cortex for objects

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that underwent active manipulation during training. This phenomenon indicates a

significant influence of the agent’s ability to visually categorize objects according
to his/her previous motor experience, indicating that the subject’s practical expertise
becomes a functional part of the cognitive process underlying the perception of tools
(see also Rowe et al. 2017).
So far so good. That the visual detection of action meanings is modulated by the
agent’s previous experience seems prima facie compatible with the assumption that
affordance perception is a form of basic cognition. However, a closer examination of
the role of expertise in visual perception reveals an interaction between seeing the
pragmatic meaning of a visual target and recognizing its semantic identity. Contrary
to the hypothesis that the ability to perceive affordance is segregated from higher
conceptual abilities, the literature has shown that the semantic classification of the
visual target biases the detection of motor possibilities (e.g., Thill et al. 2013).5 Lesion
studies may be helpful in clarifying the nature of this bias.
For instance, in an early experiment, Jeannerod et al. (1994) reported the case of
the patient A. T. with a bilateral lesion in the sensorimotor regions that caused a strong
deficit in grasping simple objects. A. T.’s major symptom was an exaggerated antici-
patory opening of the fingers with poor correlation with the size of the target object,
resulting in awkward grasps. Interestingly, such a deficit was much more marked if
the target was an unusual object compared to a commonly used object of the same
dimension. This evidence suggests that having memory of the object may compensate
for a deficit affecting the visual detection of action-related features of the environment.
Consistent with this evidence, patients suffering from damage to the areas functionally
associated with semantic recognition usually make pragmatic errors when interacting
with visual targets, grasping them by using non-functional ways (e.g., Carey et al.
1996; Milner et al. 1991). Deficits affecting semantic cognition cause patients to fail
at immediate guidance tasks of any complexity, with patients making errors even when
grasping functional objects, as they cannot select the easiest, most convenient way to
grasp them (Dijkerman et al. 2009; Schenk and McIntosh 2010). Evidence such as this
supports the hypothesis that the recruitment of semantic competence is functionally
involved in the normal detection of possibilities of action, since such competence can
influence the motor output of a related action.
Further evidence of the existence of an interaction between pragmatic and semantic
cognition has been observed in patients suffering from visual forms of optic ataxia.
What is interesting in this case is that patients with an impairment of the sensorimotor
circuit in the parietal lobe have difficulties completing visually guided reaching tasks
but show intact performance when a temporal delay is introduced between the per-
ceptual stimulus and the behavioral response (e.g., Cohen et al. 2009; Himmelbach
and Karnath 2005; Schindler et al. 2004). According to this evidence, a reasonable
assumption is that having time available, the agent performs the task by retrieving
the semantic information associated with the visual stimulus. Interestingly, this phe-
nomenon may have relevant practical implications for the development of therapies
5 It should be noted that, here I am not interested in taking a position on the vexed question of the penetrability
of vision by semantic competences. For the sake of the present argument, it is enough to show that vision
for action is significantly biased by higher categorization abilities. For the debate concerning the cognitive
penetration of vision for action see for example Nanay (2013), Burnston (2016) and Toribio (2018).

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and rehabilitation programs for patients suffering from optic ataxia (Zipoli Caiani
2017). For example, a common rehabilitation program includes compensatory strate-
gies such as the recourse to external prostheses (e.g., planners, calendars, recording
devices, timers, and pagers) in addition to internal cueing (e.g., developing mnemon-
ics or an internal checklist). Remarkably, ataxic patients were demonstrated to reduce
errors and improve performance in detecting and using visuomotor affordances by
following non-perceptual cues such as linguistic information, but only when their
memory is relatively preserved (Zgaljardic et al. 2011).
Consistent with this, a substantial amount of evidence has shown that functional
areas associated with the possession of categorization abilities also bias the detection
of visual affordances (e.g., Briscoe 2009; Chinellato and del Pobil 2016; Thill et al.
2013). In this respect, of particular importance is the interaction between the ventral
and dorsal cortical areas involved in the dual streams model of visual perception
(Goodale and Milner 1992; Jacob and Jeannerod 2003). According to this model of
visual perception, after entering the brain, the visual stimulus splits into two parallel
streams: the dorsal path, stretching from the primary visual cortex to the posterior
parietal lobe and premotor areas; and the ventral path, stretching from the associative
visual areas to the prefrontal cortex. Interestingly, it has been argued that such a
dual model of processing involves a hierarchical distinction between basic and higher
forms of visual perception. Indeed, by following a “segregation hypothesis”, the two
paths are reciprocally isolated; thus, the dorsal path is based on a discriminatory
capacity for action guiding that is not mediated by any previously stored information,
while the ventral path is considered as being always engaged in higher semantic
categorization and inferential processing (Goodale and Milner 1992; Pylyshyn 2003;
Jacob and De Vignemont 2010; Raftoupolus 2009). However, as our knowledge of
visual cognition has improved over the years, this established view was observed to be
only an approximation, and several functional interactions between the two pathways
have been discovered.
Among the functional interactions between the ventral and dorsal pathways, an
important connection is that at the level of the parietal cortex. There is evidence
that this connection strongly affects motor preparation and control of movements,
suppressing elicited sensorimotor patterns to prevent undesired actions from being
triggered. Notably, the semantic-related activity of the ventral stream ventral stream
may help in selecting the relevant patterns of action according to the agent’s intensional
representation of the target and the agent’s present intentions to act (e.g., Borra et al.
2010; Cohen et al. 2009; Hoshi and Tanji 2007; McIntosh and Schenk 2009).6

6 Someone might be concerned with the use of reverse inference in cognitive neuroscience. Typically,
cognitive neuroscientists have concluded that a psychological process is involved in an experimental task
because a particular pattern of neural activation is elicited during the task. The main concern with reverse
inference is that it is a fallacy when conceived as an instance of a conclusive reasoning such as a deduction.
It should be noted, however, that reverse inference as intended here is a heuristic instrument that allows the
formulation of empirical hypotheses. Contrary to the view that brain activation patterns are weak indicators
of the presence of cognitive processes (e.g., Poldrack 2008, 2011; Fox and Friston 2012), the heuristic value
of reverse inference can be secured by means of a suitable meta-analysis that complements it. Meta-analyses
provide a fine-grained comparison among the available evidence concerning the correlation between neural
events and psychological events associated with the execution of a specific task. Accordingly, reverse
inference can be considered predictively reliable insofar as it is supported by a suitable meta-analysis. (e.g.

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From the behavioral point of view, evidence has shown that the magnitude of the
interaction between vision and action changes according to the presence of contextual
semantic cues, for example, there is evidence that perceiving affordances is modulated
by the understating of the verbal context, and that the detection of affordances is
sensible to the identification of distractor targets (e.g., Caligiore et al. 2013; Ellis
et al. 2007). Several studies (e.g., Costantini et al. 2011; Ambrosini et al. 2012) have
shown that the selection between affordances in the environment can be influenced by
concurrent semantic tasks. In these studies, participants had to decide whether a verb
referring to function, manipulation, or observation (e.g., “to drink”, “to grasp”, “to
look at”) matched an object located in the near or far space. Interestingly, participants
were slower with observation verbs than with manipulation and function verbs, and
with both function and manipulation verbs, the participants were faster when objects
were presented within the reachable space. These results indicate that understanding
a linguistic context influences the competition between object affordances, and that
action verbs semantic processing biases vision for action (see also Lee et al. 2013).
In this respect, Borghi and Riggio (2015), have demonstrated that the visual detec-
tion of affordances is modulated by the ability to recognize the identity of contextual
features in the environment, particularly when the visual target is unknown to the
agent. Notably, if the target is a novel object, perceivers rely on the classification
of physical and social signs to conjecture its functional identity and then infer the
related possibilities of action (see also, Pellicano et al. 2011). Additionally, Kalénine
et al. (2014) have shown that the conceptual categorization of manipulable objects is
associated with the potentiation of affordance perception. Authors have argued that
because the evocation of affordances is responsive to the semantic congruence of the
visual environment in which objects are presented, the conceptual categorization of
contextual cues “could work as a late filter which would enhance relevant action fea-
tures and turn off irrelevant ones” (Kalénine et al. 2014, p. 650). Moreover, Tipper
et al. (2006) showed that seeing the same visual target (e.g., a door handle) can evoke
different action possibilities depending on the stimulus properties of the object that are
actually attended. Affordance-related effects, indeed, were obtained only when agents
had to discriminate properties of the object linked to action (e.g., shape), but did not
occur when agents had to categorize the visual target according to action-irrelevant
properties (e.g., color).
In a series of experiments, Constable et al. (2011, 2014) showed that affordance
perception and interaction are modulated by the knowledge of the social norms related
to the visual target. Notably, it has been shown that the same cup, with the same action
possibilities, can elicit different motor responses depending on who is considered the
cup’s owner. The effect of ownership can be shown by means of a standard compatibil-
ity effect task in which participants had to respond to the color of the cup’s handle by
pressing either a left or a right key (Constable et al. 2014). The analysis of the response
time revealed a spatial compatibility effect when the owner of the showed cup was the

Footnote 6 continued
Hutzler 2014; Nathan and Pinal 2017; Machery 2014). Notably, Sect. 4 of this paper presents a row meta-
analysis of this sort. For more detailed meta-analyses concerning the interactions between semantic and
visuomotor capacities, see for example Zipoli Caiani and Ferretti (2017), Briscoe and Schwenkler (2015),
Brogaard (2011) and Schenk and McIntosh (2010).

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participant, that is, behavioral responses were faster when the orientation of the handle
was congruent with the location of the key to press. Remarkably, such an effect was
absent when the showed cup pertained to a different person, namely, no affordance
effect was present for objects that were categorized as belonging to others. Evidence
such as this allow to infer that affordance perception is not due to low level automatic
mechanisms segregated from categorization abilities, but rather it is influenced by the
classification of the visual target according to social norms concerning ownership.
Such evidence supports the hypothesis that action evocation during visual per-
ception is not fully automatic; instead, the detection of affordances is biased toward
context-relevant variables that depend on the agent’s attentional and categorization
abilities (see also, Makris et al. 2013). Accordingly, although possible that some basic
acts may be performed independently of top-down knowledge, the evidence shows
that the detection of visual opportunities for action is driven by higher-order semantic
abilities (Zipoli Caiani and Ferretti 2017). This means that the visuomotor sensitivity
of an agent to action-related objects can be modulated by his/her motor expertise (Fer-
retti 2016, 2017), resulting from a history of extensive training and acquisition of new
semantic competences (for a detailed review and discussion of the relevant evidence,
see also Borghi 2018).
To sum up, the available evidence clearly shows two relevant features of vision
for action: the perception of affordances is related to the agent’s motor expertise, and
the agent’s motor expertise is biased by the retrieval of semantic information based
on categorization ability. As the literature regarding the interface between vision and
action has increased over time, it has become more evident that the perception of spatial
relations and affordances is shaped by cognitive resources that extend beyond the
boundaries of basic sensorimotor cognition, and that higher competence can influence
the motor output of related actions. Nowadays, several proposals share this view,
according to which, agents detect possibilities of action by means of the semantic
categorization of the perceptual stimulus. According to such an approach, the ability
to visually detect affordances in the environment depends on the structural properties
of the environment and intensional factors, such as the observer’s capacity to represent
the visual target by means of semantic categorization (e.g., Cisek and Kalaska 2010;
Zipoli Caiani and Ferretti 2017).
This circumstance raises a relevant issue concerning the explanatory ambition of
RE as introduced by Hutto and Myin (2012, 2017). Indeed, because perceiving and
interacting with affordances is modulated by the agent’s semantic competence, it
involves intensional categorization and, therefore, can hardly be conceived of as a
form of basic cognition. As a result, contrary to one of the main tenets of RE, the
perception of affordances cannot be fully explained through the mere extensional
modeling of the interaction between vision and action.7
To resume: a comprehensive explanation of the ability to detect and interact with
possibilities of action should account for the intensional biases that affect vision for
action. Since RE aims to provide an account of affordances in terms of a purely
7 In line with this view, Gadsby and Williams (2018) have recently argued that, at present, non-
representational model of cognition cannot account for the evidence concerning the behavioral anomalies
of patients suffering from anorexia nervosa. Differently, the same set of evidence can be accommodated
within a representational framework by means of the notion of body schema (e.g., De Vignemont 2014).

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extensional language (Sect. 2), two options are available: either RE provides an account
that explains in purely extensional terms the semantic categorization abilities of an
agent or RE cannot account for all the relevant variables involved in perceiving and
acting with the affordances of the environment. In other words, since according to
RE, “in basic kinds of cognition an organism’s skillful engagements with the world
are best understood in embodied, enactive, and nonrepresentational ways” (Hutto
and Myin 2017, p. 101–102), to be successful, RE should provide an account of the
intensionality of vision for action that does not involve conditions of satisfaction and
ways to categorize visual targets. However, at present, this sort of account is not
available.

5 Conclusions

According to Hutto and Myin, RE is the view according to which vision for action is
a basic form of cognition that can be conceived as an extensional, dynamical loopy
process spanning the agent’s brain, body, and environment, without involving inten-
sional representations and categorization abilities (e.g., Hutto and Myin 2017, p. 9).
At the core of this perspective is the assumption that DST provides the best method-
ological tools to account for basic cognitive capacities, such as the visual perception of
action opportunities in the environment (§2). Over the last decades, indeed, consider-
able work has been devoted to the dynamical modeling of affordance perception and
obtained relevant theoretical and experimental results (§3). However, an increasing
body of evidence is demonstrating that perceiving affordances is not segregated from
higher forms of cognition but modulated by the semantic competence of the perceiving
agent (§4). Therefore, the perception of affordance cannot, as previously thought, be
classified as a basic form of cognition.
This raises an interesting problem for RE, inasmuch as the available evidence shows
that our capacity to visually detect the possibilities of action offered by an object is
dependent on the categorization of the object itself, so that seeing an affordance is
always reliant on the semantic classification of the related target. This means that
a suitable account of vision for action should refer to an intensional approach of
modeling cognition, which involves the ascription of meanings and the adoption of
norms of correctness precluded to RE (Ferretti 2016, 2017, 2018; Zipoli Caiani 2014).
Thus, the semantic categorization of a visual target depends on the attribution of a
system of symbols through which things can be intensionally represented as “being
thus and so”.
Importantly, this argument should not be intended as providing a solution to the
issue raised by HPC (Sect. 2); instead, this argument emphasizes the explanatory limits
of a mere extensional view of basic cognition. More precisely, the discovery of inten-
sional biases in interacting and perceiving affordances has two main consequences.
First, the functional role of semantic cognition in perceiving affordances shows that
vision for action cannot be entirely modeled as a direct interaction between the agent
and environment but requires the critical reference to categorization abilities. Sec-
ond, the pervasiveness of intensional biases in vision for action makes distinguishing
between lower and higher forms of cognition difficult if not impossible. Remarkably,

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the absence of genuine forms of basic visual cognition makes the adoption of a purely
extensional language unsuccessful, at least concerning vision for action.8
To resume, since the ability to detect affordances cannot be regarded as a mere
form of extensional interaction between brain, body and environment, RE has not
enough resources to assert that vision for action is a case of basic, extensional cogni-
tion. Instead, the discovery of intensional biases in vision for action opens the door
to considering RC as an appropriate source of modeling the empirical evidence con-
cerning affordance perception, even without engaging with the metaphysical reality
of representational entities.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the audience of the biannual conference of the Italian Society
for Analytic Philosophy held in September 2018, and Gabriele Ferretti for comments and suggestions. I’m
also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for allowing me to improve the paper.

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