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Title: Attention and Attendabilia: The Perception of Attentional Affordances - 30 Jul, 2020.
Affordances are perceptible opportunities for action (Gibson 1966). A teapot, for instance, can afford the act of gripping for a subject, and the subject can perceive the teapot as being grippable. The vast interdisciplinary literature on affordances is concerned almost exclusively with affordances for bodily actions like gripping, eating or walking. In recent work I have argued that we are also sensitive to affordances for mental actions like imagining, counting and deliberating. Our sensitivity to these mental affordances helps guide our mental actions in much the same way that our sensitivity to bodily affordances helps guide our bodily actions. In this paper I will look more closely at one kind of mental affordance: affordances to attend. I will argue that: 1) we perceive stimuli as affording attention (i.e. as being attendable), and 2) perceiving a stimulus as affording attention can automatically prepare a shift of attention to that stimulus
Tom McClelland is a lecturer in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a College Research Associate at Clare College Cambridge. His research covers a range of topics in philosophy of mind, psychology, metaphysics, aesthetics and the philosophy of business. He is also known for his love for tea and his work on the gibsonian notion of affordances. In this webinar he will talk about one kind of mental affordance: affordances to attend.
Giovanni Rolla is an associate professor of philosophy at UFBA, Brazil. His background is in traditional epistemology and philosophy of mind, and his recent research focuses on embodied cognition and radical enactivism. His most recent papers develop a radically enactive account of rationality and an enactive-ecological account of information (with Eros de Carvalho). He is interested in exploring an enactive-ecological account of cognition, which involves combining the notions of sensorimotor regularities and affordances, and whether this combined approach is capable to explain so-called high-cognition.
Elena Partesotti is a Postdoctoral fellow at the Interdisciplinary Nucleus for Sound Studies (NICS), at Unicamp, Brazil. Her research is on the behavioural changes and multimodal interaction within a performative space called BehCreative. On her studies of musical technologies she has developed and patented a prototype musical software, winning the Prometeo prize for innovation. From an interdisciplinary perspective, she is investigating the possibilities that the concept of affordance offers within interactive technologies. In her previous publications, she has introduced the concept of Multiple Affordances (also referred to as Multiple Trajectories; see Partesotti et al. 2018).
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