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Extending the notion of affordance

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Abstract

Post-Gibson attempts to set out a definition of affordance generally agree that this notion can be understood as a property of the environment with salience for an organism’s behavior. According to this view, some scholars advocate the idea that affordances are dispositional properties of physical objects that, given suitable circumstances, necessarily actualize related actions. This paper aims at assessing this statement in light of a theory of affordance perception. After years of discontinuity between strands of empirical and theoretical research, the time is ripe for addressing the question of whether the dispositional interpretation of affordance is in accordance with some recent evidence from cognitive science and neuroscience. Following this line, I clarify that there are some cases of affordance-related effects that neither require the actualization of an action, nor the presence of an action-related property bearer in the environment, and that the identification of affordance with physical properties provides only a partial explanation of the wide range of affordance-related effects. Accordingly, I argue in favor of a more general account of affordance perception based on the ability to directly detect perceptual patterns in the environment.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted that my approach is not intended as an exhaustive account of Gibson’s original conception.

  2. Gibson traces the origin of the concept of affordance back to the notion of “demand character” introduced by Kurt Koffka (1935) within the framework of Gestalt Theory.

  3. For a defense of the inferential approach to perception against Gibson’s ecological theory, see Ullman (1980) and Fodor and Pylyshyn (1981).

  4. This is the simplified version of Lewis’s (reformed) conditional analysis (Lewis 1997).

  5. This result is in contrast with Tucker and Ellis (2001), according to whom affordance-related compatibility effects are not dependent on the object being presented within the actual reaching space of the observer. The reason is easily explained. The difference is due to Tucker and Ellis’s experimental settings, in which objects were always presented behind a plastic LCD screen that inevitably biased any attempt to modulate their reachability by varying the spatial distance between the target and the observer.

  6. This ability is served by the functioning of the ventral stream of the visual system (Norman 2002; Jacob and Jeannerod 2003).

  7. This experiment confirms the results obtained by Costantini and Sinigaglia (2011) with neurobiological data.

  8. It could be insightful to see the notions of direct perception in light of the distinction between the dorsal and the ventral pathway of perception (Jacob and Jeannerod 2003; Rizzolatti and Matelli 2003; Borra et al. 2008). For an interesting discussion on this and related topics, see Norman (2002), Garbarini and Adenzato (2004), and Young (2006).

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Acknowledgments

I thank Corrado Sinigaglia, Marco Fenici, Luca Casartelli, Chiara Brozzo and Anna Boncompagni for their comments and suggestions.

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Correspondence to Silvano Zipoli Caiani.

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Zipoli Caiani, S. Extending the notion of affordance. Phenom Cogn Sci 13, 275–293 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9295-1

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