The Influence of Cooperative Action Intention on Object Affordance: Evidence from the Perspective-taking Ability of Individuals

In complex interactive scenarios, action understanding lies at the heart of social interactions. Nevertheless, the ability to understand action intention may differ among people. The current study distinguished two groups of participants with different social intention-understanding abilities (high and low) based on a perspective-taking task to investigate the influence of social intention on object affordance under conditions of individual and cooperative action intention. In the affordance perception experiment, participants were shown a video with the presenter reaching to grasp an object in different grips and asked to classify objects into kitchen or non-kitchen items by pressing the left- or right-hand button under the two intention conditions. The results showed that the object affordance effects were modulated by the participants' understanding of social intention in the interactive scenarios. Specifically, the object affordance effects were observed only in the high perspective-taking ability group under the condition of cooperative action intention. However, under the condition of individual action intention, object affordance effects were shown in both the high and low perspective-taking ability groups, and the difference between the two groups was not significant. This study suggests that processing of object affordance depends greatly on the contextual correspondence of perception and action and that the understanding of cooperative action intention can affect the activation of object affordance.