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Workshop: Virtual Reality and Affordances

Am 30. Mai 2024 wird am Institut für Philosophie ein Workshop zum Thema "Virtual Reality and Affordances" stattfinden.

Veranstaltungsdaten

Am 30. Mai 2024 wird am Institut für Philosophie ein internationaler Workshop zum Thema "Virtual Reality and Affordances" stattfinden. Das Poster finden Sie hier und Abstracts finden Sie unten. Das Programm gestaltet sich wie folgt:

9:00 – Introduction

Chair: Cornelius Greis

9:15 – 10:00: Zuzanna Rucińska – Are there 'Virtual' Affordances?

10:15 – 11:00: Lisa Zander – Do Affordances Make Virtual Reality Real?

11:15 – 12:00: Jan Tünnermann – Selective Visual Attention and Object Affordances: Implications for Virtual Reality Scenarios

12:15 – 13:00: Markus Werning – How Are Affordances Encoded, Expressed, and Processed in Linguistic Communication?

Lunch

Chair: Tobias Reinsch

15:00 – 15:45: Alexander Becker – Aristotelian Affordances?

16:00 – 16:45: Maik Niemeck – Indexical Thought, Affordances and Virtual Worlds 

17:00 – 17:45: Marta Jorba – On Cognitive Affordances

Workshop Dinner

This Workshop is funded by
MArburg University Research Academy
Ursula-Kuhlmann-Fonds

Abstracts:

Zuzanna Rucińska – Are there 'Virtual' Affordances?
This talk aims to offer an enactivist perspective on the notion of affordances in VR. It will argue that there are no special, ‘virtual’ affordances in VR, akin to mental affordances (McClelland 2020), only ‘regular’ affordances as found in non-virtual environments. While the affordances in VR are not mirroring real life affordances, the process by which we arrive at affordances is the same in both the real and the virtual environments. That way of arriving at affordances is through perception as coupled to action (Gibson 1979; O’Regan and Noë 2001), which takes place as we are using VR technology (Baggs, Grabarczyk & Rucińska 2024). There is also no special kind of process (imaginative or representational) needed to see affordances in VR. I will end by positioning my enactive view against the one available in the literature (Rolla, Vasconcelos & Figueiredo 2022), which is that virtual experiences do not have a biologically-relevant meaning and so an enactivist account of VR should see affordances to be lacking in virtual environments – a criterion I argue is too constraining.

Jan Tünnermann – Selective Visual Attention and Object Affordances: Implications for Virtual Reality Scenarios
Selective visual attention is closely linked with the preparation and execution of actions, and the detection of object affordances in the visual environment can influence the deployment of attention. I discuss this interplay and highlight implications for virtual reality settings.

Markus Werning – How Are Affordances Encoded, Expressed, and Processed in Linguistic Communication? 
The talk surveys a variety of lexical, morphological and syntactical ways to communicate the affordances of concrete objects in language. We distinguish between generic and ad hoc affordances, where the latter are stored as telic components in the lexicon of nouns, whereas the latter are largely context dependent. In several neurolinguistic EEG studies, we investigate how lexical and contextual factors interact in sentence meaning composition and how they affect semantic expectations in a predictive processing account of language comprehension.

Alexander Becker – Aristotelian Affordances?
Affordances can be seen as a combination of world-to-subject and subject-to-world fit. Aristotle‘s conception of „objects of perception“ seem to exhibit a similiar structure. The talk will present this conception and explore how it can be transferred to different theoretical contexts.

Maik Niemeck – Indexical Thought, Affordances and Virtual Worlds
In this talk I will explore the idea that indexical thought typically comes with an awareness of affordances. Indexical thoughts present objects, places and times within actionable reach. When we, for instance, think of a place as <here> rather than <there>, we think of it as a place where we can do stuff, since thinkers are usually at the place of their thoughts. I will show that this idea is also supported by our interaction with virtual worlds. When people play video games or use virtual reality headsets, they tend to talk about the worlds presented by these devices in indexical terms. This is different when people are passively watching TV shows or reading a book. I will conclude that the crucial difference between both ways of thinking is grounded in the ways these virtual worlds provide action possibilities to an agent and that all this is evidence for the claim that indexical thought is closely connected to the representation of action possibilities – a view that has been challenged by so-called de se skeptics.

Marta Jorba – On Cognitive Affordances
Some recent work on affordances defends that affordances can be applied and function in the mental realm, arguing for the existence of
mental affordances (McClelland 2020) and cognitive affordances (Jorba 2020). These views have been criticized by Segundo-Ortín and Heras-Escribano (2023). In this talk, I defend the view of cognitive affordances from such criticisms and further substantiate it by appealing to inner speech and what I call verbal affordances.