Abstract
Everyday objects offer invitations to act (affordances). Most empirical work on affordances has focused on the shape and size of objects, neglecting the analysis of other visual properties, such as texture, investigated instead by designers. Texture perception depends on the type of material, which changes the familiarity, aesthetics, and action(s) an object offers. Here, we investigated the influence of aesthetics and material sustainability on affordance activation. We thus employed objects in materials. We re-adapted a well-established paradigm in literature, showing objects with the same shape, made from sustainable and non-sustainable materials (namely, plastic vs. wood) with varying degrees of familiarity and pleasantness. The objects were positioned at a near or far distance, and followed by different kinds of verbs (observation, manipulation, function, interaction). Participants also completed the Pro-Environmental Behaviors Scale (PEBS) and rated the objects according to seven dimensions: pleasantness, familiarity, sustainability, hardness, heaviness, ownership, and sociality. Results showed greater facilitation with plastic objects compared to the wooden ones when presented in the near space and followed by function verbs. However, we also found a main effect of the material, with response times (RTs) shorter for wooden objects, especially when followed by interaction verbs. We found no correlation between RTs and PEBS, though several significant interactions occurred, and we argue that the material component affected affordances within the specific interplay between object location and linguistic elaboration, hypothesizing that beauty might have transversely modulated the responses.