Affordances and contextual flexibility Comment on "Action Semantics: A unifying conceptual framework for the selective use of multimodal and modality-specific object knowledge " by Michiel

The theory proposed by van Elk et al.[1] is compelling and I believe it will greatly contribute to the debate in the field. In my commentary I will briefly report some recent studies performed in our lab and in other labs demonstrating that the context (intended in terms of the task and of the physical and social context) influences the activation of affordances, in line with the perspective outlined by van Elk et al.[1]. The influence of the task was demonstrated by experiments showing that a task requiring to process object shape influenced affordance activation, but a color categorization task did not ([2]; see also [3]). Further studies showed that action evocation during object processing was modulated by the physical context. Behavioral [4] and EEG results [5] demonstrated that motor information was differently activated when a target-object was presented together with a second object, functionally or spatially related to the target, and with a hand displaying either a manipulative or a functional grip (see also [6]). [7] showed the effect of a complex visual context on activation of action related to conflict objects which could evoke either a clench or a pinch grip