Effects of different volumes of a water-soluble and biodegradable nesting material on behavior, pain, glycemia, farrowing traits, and performance in crated sows.

Affordances are defined as the possibilities for action/interaction offered by objects in the environment to a given organism, given its biological constraints (Gibson, ). This definition was further specified by Ellis and Tucker () with the introduction of “micro-affordances”, according to which perceiving specific objects features (e.g., size) potentiates specific action components (e.g., grip). Micro-affordances have been investigated using the grasp-compatibility task in which participants had to categorize an object as natural or artifact by grasping a response device with a power or a precision grip. Performance improves when the response grip is congruent with the object size (e.g., small object and precision grip, compatible trials), while it worsens when the response grip is not congruent (e.g., small object and power grip, incompatible trials). This difference in performance, referred to as the grasp-compatibility effect, suggests that seeing a graspable object activates a set of potential hand motor programs associated with the pragmatic characteristic of the object (e.g., size and shape), facilitating the execution of the congruent response (e.g., Bub et al., ; Derbyshire et al., ; Garofalo & Riggio, ; Tucker & Ellis, ). Micro-affordances derive from perception-action patterns of hand–object interaction represented in the brain (Ellis & Tucker, ; Grèzes et al., ). These patterns can be defined as ‘ affordances when they emerge from consolidated and constant experiences across different contexts, as for example the typical way in which we grasp objects with different sizes. Conversely, affordances can be defined as ‘ when they are related to temporary pragmatic object properties, such as its orientation or spatial location, requiring an online updating of information to define the current state of the object. Given the variability of these properties across contexts, variable affordances are not usually stored in the object representation (Borghi and Riggio , ). Objects spatial features are crucial for our sensorimotor system to parametrize object-directed actions (Jeannerod et al., ). In everyday life, we typically interact with objects within a well-defined portion of space. This sector of space includes objects that are located near enough to be reached by our effectors, that is the peripersonal space (PPS). Objects located within PPS are within hand-reaching distance whereas objects located outside PPS, that is in extrapersonal space (EPS), cannot be reached without approaching movements of the whole body (Berti and Frassinetti ; di Pellegrino and Làdavas ). Increasing evidence has demonstrated that primates have different brain representations for different sectors of space (e.g., Berti & Frassinetti, ; Gross & Graziano, ; Maravita et al., ). For example, physiological evidence showed that PPS and EPS recruit two separate fronto-parietal circuits designed to solve different computational problems involving motor control. It has been proposed that these sectors of space are encoded separately by the brain in terms of potential motor acts (Fogassi et al., ; Rizzolatti et al., ). The representation of PPS is mediated by the same circuit involved in the visuomotor control of arm and hand movements, while circuits controlling for eye movements and gaze direction are the same involved in coding the EPS (for a review Gross & Graziano, ). Accordingly, behavioral studies, using different tasks, demonstrated that graspable objects elicit motor-related effects when an object is presented in PPS, but not when presented beyond reach where the involvement of the hand motor system is reduced (Ambrosini & Costantini, ; Costantini et al., , ; De Stefani et al., ; Kalénine et al., ). In particular, Costantini et al. (, ) conducted studies involving a 3D hand-to-handle alignment task. Participants were asked to mimic a reach-to-grasp movement, either with the left or the right hand, based on a given instruction. The researchers found that participants responded faster when the orientation of their responding hand matched the orientation of the virtual object, but only if the object was positioned within a reachable area of the 3D environment. Recent evidence has demonstrated that also the processing of graspable objects nouns leads to the activation of specific motor programs (for review see, Buccino et al., ; Vigliocco et al., ), shown by the presence of grasp-compatibility effects related to the object size denoted by the noun (e.g., Bub & Masson, ; Garofalo et al., ; Glover et al., ; Marino et al., ). Thus, stable affordances are re-enacted during noun processing (Borghi & Riggio, ). By contrast, the processing of temporary object features (i.e., variable affordances) does not seem to influence the performance during language comprehension. In two experiments, Ferri and colleagues () investigated whether objects and their nouns share similar motor representations. In Experiment 1, participants performed a g