Abstract
Affordances describe the possible actions that an agent can perform on an object, which are determined by the agent’s morphology as well as the object’s perceptual features. Although previous research has shown that the perception of affordances affects the reaction times of the actions towards the targeted object, whether affordance perception also affects the perceived duration of the observed object during motor action has yet to be investigated, which is what we aimed in the current study. Observers (N= 10) were immersed in a virtual reality environment to experience two types of avatar hands in different conditions: one with normal hands that can afford- and one with fingerless “capsule” hands that cannot afford the grasping action. In each trial, a pan-with-a-handle stimulus was generated directly in front of them, with the handle randomly oriented towards their left- or right-hand side. The subject had to reach and touch the pan with the instructed hand if it was upside down or the opposite hand if it was right side up, for each hand type condition in a stimulus-response compatibility paradigm setup (M. Tucker & R. Ellis, 1998). The pan stimulus was considered as “congruent” if the handle was on the same side as the correct hand to reach and “incongruent” if it was on the opposite side. After the pan disappeared upon contact, subjects reproduced the time they perceived to take to perform their action by pressing and holding the spacebar using the method of reproduction. Our results have shown that congruency and hand type, but not their interaction, had significant effects on reproduced durations – that the perceived duration of the observed target object was more compressed in the incongruent than in the congruent trials, and in capsule than in normal hands, demonstrating the effect of affordances on subjective time.