Contents: Preface. Part I: Affordances. B. Bril, J. Foucart, Enacting the Perception of the Affor... more Contents: Preface. Part I: Affordances. B. Bril, J. Foucart, Enacting the Perception of the Affordances of Potential Tools I: The Case of Children Hammering. S. Cornus, G. Walther, T. Rupp, L. Rasseneur, Perceiving the Obstacle Step-Acrossability After the Maximal Exercise Test. J. Foucart, S. Hirata, K. Fuwa, B. Bril, Enacting the Perception of the Affordances of Potential Tools II: The Case of Chimpanzees Nut-Cracking. V.C. Ramenzoni, M. Riley, T. Davis, J. Snyder, Perceiving Whether or Not Another Person Can Use a Step to Reach an Object. G-J. Pepping, J. Smith, Posting Balls Through Holes: Effect of Hole-Size and Background Texture on Action Initiation Time and the Perception of Affordances. S. Stasik, L.S. Mark, Comfort as a Determinant of the Location of Critical Boundaries in the Act of Reaching. K.R. Taylor, J.B. Wagman, Feeling and Seeing to Avoid Tripping. C-M. Yang, T.A. Stoffregen, B.G. Bardy, Postural Sway Supports Affordance Perception. Part II: Interpersonal Perceptio...
Both ecological psychology and enaction theory offer an alternative to long-standing theoretical ... more Both ecological psychology and enaction theory offer an alternative to long-standing theoretical approaches to perception that invoke post-perceptual supplemental processes or structures, e.g., mental representations, to account for perceptual phenomena. They both do so by taking actions by the individual to be essential for an account of perception and cognition. The question that this paper attempts to address is whether ecological psychology and enaction theory can be integrated into a stronger non-representational alternative to perception than either one can offer on its own. Doing so is only possible if most of the basic tenets and concepts of ecological psychology and enaction theory are compatible. Based on an examination of the role that sensations play within each approach; the manner in which each treats the concept of information; and how each conceptualizes an organism's boundaries, it is concluded that a synthesis of the two approaches is not possible. Particular attention is paid to the concept of sensations, the limitations of which were an impetus for the development of ecological psychology.
It is usually a mark of good design when technologies and tools that mediate goal-directed action... more It is usually a mark of good design when technologies and tools that mediate goal-directed action are such that the user’s attentional focus is maintained on the intended ends of action rather than on the technologies and tools themselves. When the mediators become the focus, the continuity of goal-directed action is disrupted, and the flow of action can be re-directed. What then is the purpose of the projects designed by the RAAAF studio, as described by Rietveld, which seem to be intended to do both? Disruption of the continuity of goal-directed perception-action may prompt reflection about the circumstances at work, and in so doing provoke a transformation in habitual patterns of action and of thought. The project “The End of Sitting” is intended to remediate the adverse health effects of standard chair-dominated offices through an unconventional office landscape that prompts intermittent postural readjustments, boosting the levels of activity common in such settings. The project...
An animal's habitat is filled with places that support activities in daily life. There are places... more An animal's habitat is filled with places that support activities in daily life. There are places, for example, that afford sleeping, eating, hiding, and gathering with others. Most places reflect the environment's nested structure. Even as perception-action is coupled to structure at the level of affordances, it is also coupled especially in human societies to dynamic structures at the level of places within which affordances are nested. These places have a distinctive complexity arising from the collective actions of individuals. For this reason, place-specific activities in human habitats are nearly always embedded in collective social practices. If children are to function adaptively as social beings in the community where they develop and live from day to day, they must learn not only where such places are located but also and critically how to participate in them. Owing to shared intersubjective intentions that give rise to places as behavior settings, individuals' actions in community settings are normatively constrained in the course of their participating in those settings. Consideration of the place within which perception-action is nested is indispensable if we hope to attain an adequate understanding of human perception-action in community settings as well as in some of the settings where research is conducted. What are the concepts needed for a proper study of behavior? I begin with activity, activity with a function, of course. Activity within an environment to which an organism is responsive, and adaptation to that environment as organism and environment change in their continual relationship and exchange. (E. J. Gibson, 2003, p. 293) Ecological psychology takes dynamic organism-environment reciprocity as its core tenet. Concerns about change over time then is intrinsic to all psychological inquiry from the standpoint of an ecological perspective. For this reason, ecological psychology is, by its very nature, a developmental psychology. Still, one might pragmatically designate a certain subset of work from an ecological perspective as developmental when its emphasis is on changes in psychological functioning within a certain age range anywhere over the course of the life span. Research to date emphasizing changes in perception-action with age as a marker has been limited mostly to the period between infancy through early childhood. One way to organize this body of research is with reference to features of the environment toward which activity is directed and coordinated. If we do so, the following lines of inquiry
James Gibson's final book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979/1986) may have had ... more James Gibson's final book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979/1986) may have had the unintended effect of overshadowing his prior, seminal work, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966). This circumstance is unfortunate because in many ways the final book has a narrower focus. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems not only considers other perceptual systems in addition to vision but also it is in this work where Gibson most fully lays out his ecological approach to psychology. In doing so, the book gives more explicit attention to human evolution and sociocultural processes than do his other writings. Although Gibson establishes a framework for considering perception-action commonalities across species, he also examines some of the ways in which perceiving among human and nonhuman animals differ. Among those issues examined are how tool use in the production of pictures and representations has contributed to cultural change, how language can affect perceiving, and how social structures are perceived. The ongoing debate over the conceptual status of affordances is reexamined from the point of view of sociohistorical processes.
This investigation examined the hypothesis that the evaluation of the affective content of a film... more This investigation examined the hypothesis that the evaluation of the affective content of a film scene would be determined by the interaction of scene content and film cutting rate. Two simple narrative films were shot differing only in the emotions expressed (happiness or anger), and two edited versions of each film, a fast and a slow cutting rate version, were prepared. Subjects evaluated the principles in the films as well as their own feelings while watching the films, using Mehrabian and Russell's emotional state inventory. The results supported the interaction hypothesis, as indicated by the findings that the faster cutting enhanced the positive ratings of a speaker in the “happy” film, but led to enhanced negative ratings of the same speaker when he presented an angry demeanor. In the angry scenes, where there may be multiple layers of meaning and emotional content, the interaction effects were more complex, but still largely consistent with the hypothesis.
Take the case of the perception of landscape. A photograph of a landscape captures from a single ... more Take the case of the perception of landscape. A photograph of a landscape captures from a single observation point and in an instant of time, the array of forms before the camera lens. Likewise, an individual can adopt, momentarily, a similar attitude with respect to a ...
Behavior settings" are generated by joint actions of individuals in conjunction with the milieu f... more Behavior settings" are generated by joint actions of individuals in conjunction with the milieu features (or affordances) that are available. The reported research explores the hypothesis that the identity or meaning of a behavior setting can be perceived by means of the patterns of action collectively generated by the setting's participants. A set of computer animations was created based on detailed observation of activities in everyday settings. Three experiments were conducted to assess whether perceivers could extract "structure from motion" (in this case, collective actions) that was specific to the particular behavior setting displayed by way of the animations. Two experiments assessed whether individuals could accurately perceive the identity of the behavior settings with such displays, and a third experiment indirectly examined this possibility by evaluating whether setting possibilities and constraints were recognized. The results offered some support for the hypothesis, and suggested several refinements in how to conceptualize a typology of behavior settings. An ecological approach to place perception is also discussed.
Route-learning, considered from an ecological approach to perception, is posited to involve the d... more Route-learning, considered from an ecological approach to perception, is posited to involve the detection of information over time that specifies a path from one location to another. The study examines whether the use of a visual navigational system (e.g., GPS) may impede route-learning by drawing attention away from transitions along a path that serve as information for way-finding. Virtual reality (VR) technology used in conjunction with an extensive, detailed environmental simulation was employed to explore this possibility. One group of participants drove a simulated car in VR along a designated path while relying on visual GPS guidance. It was expected that use of the GPS display would draw attention away from temporally continuous path information. A second group initially drove the same route without GPS guidance. Both groups drove the path a second time without navigational assistance. Overall, the percentage of correct actions taken at intersections (transitions) during the...
Contents: Preface. Part I: Affordances. B. Bril, J. Foucart, Enacting the Perception of the Affor... more Contents: Preface. Part I: Affordances. B. Bril, J. Foucart, Enacting the Perception of the Affordances of Potential Tools I: The Case of Children Hammering. S. Cornus, G. Walther, T. Rupp, L. Rasseneur, Perceiving the Obstacle Step-Acrossability After the Maximal Exercise Test. J. Foucart, S. Hirata, K. Fuwa, B. Bril, Enacting the Perception of the Affordances of Potential Tools II: The Case of Chimpanzees Nut-Cracking. V.C. Ramenzoni, M. Riley, T. Davis, J. Snyder, Perceiving Whether or Not Another Person Can Use a Step to Reach an Object. G-J. Pepping, J. Smith, Posting Balls Through Holes: Effect of Hole-Size and Background Texture on Action Initiation Time and the Perception of Affordances. S. Stasik, L.S. Mark, Comfort as a Determinant of the Location of Critical Boundaries in the Act of Reaching. K.R. Taylor, J.B. Wagman, Feeling and Seeing to Avoid Tripping. C-M. Yang, T.A. Stoffregen, B.G. Bardy, Postural Sway Supports Affordance Perception. Part II: Interpersonal Perceptio...
Both ecological psychology and enaction theory offer an alternative to long-standing theoretical ... more Both ecological psychology and enaction theory offer an alternative to long-standing theoretical approaches to perception that invoke post-perceptual supplemental processes or structures, e.g., mental representations, to account for perceptual phenomena. They both do so by taking actions by the individual to be essential for an account of perception and cognition. The question that this paper attempts to address is whether ecological psychology and enaction theory can be integrated into a stronger non-representational alternative to perception than either one can offer on its own. Doing so is only possible if most of the basic tenets and concepts of ecological psychology and enaction theory are compatible. Based on an examination of the role that sensations play within each approach; the manner in which each treats the concept of information; and how each conceptualizes an organism's boundaries, it is concluded that a synthesis of the two approaches is not possible. Particular attention is paid to the concept of sensations, the limitations of which were an impetus for the development of ecological psychology.
It is usually a mark of good design when technologies and tools that mediate goal-directed action... more It is usually a mark of good design when technologies and tools that mediate goal-directed action are such that the user’s attentional focus is maintained on the intended ends of action rather than on the technologies and tools themselves. When the mediators become the focus, the continuity of goal-directed action is disrupted, and the flow of action can be re-directed. What then is the purpose of the projects designed by the RAAAF studio, as described by Rietveld, which seem to be intended to do both? Disruption of the continuity of goal-directed perception-action may prompt reflection about the circumstances at work, and in so doing provoke a transformation in habitual patterns of action and of thought. The project “The End of Sitting” is intended to remediate the adverse health effects of standard chair-dominated offices through an unconventional office landscape that prompts intermittent postural readjustments, boosting the levels of activity common in such settings. The project...
An animal's habitat is filled with places that support activities in daily life. There are places... more An animal's habitat is filled with places that support activities in daily life. There are places, for example, that afford sleeping, eating, hiding, and gathering with others. Most places reflect the environment's nested structure. Even as perception-action is coupled to structure at the level of affordances, it is also coupled especially in human societies to dynamic structures at the level of places within which affordances are nested. These places have a distinctive complexity arising from the collective actions of individuals. For this reason, place-specific activities in human habitats are nearly always embedded in collective social practices. If children are to function adaptively as social beings in the community where they develop and live from day to day, they must learn not only where such places are located but also and critically how to participate in them. Owing to shared intersubjective intentions that give rise to places as behavior settings, individuals' actions in community settings are normatively constrained in the course of their participating in those settings. Consideration of the place within which perception-action is nested is indispensable if we hope to attain an adequate understanding of human perception-action in community settings as well as in some of the settings where research is conducted. What are the concepts needed for a proper study of behavior? I begin with activity, activity with a function, of course. Activity within an environment to which an organism is responsive, and adaptation to that environment as organism and environment change in their continual relationship and exchange. (E. J. Gibson, 2003, p. 293) Ecological psychology takes dynamic organism-environment reciprocity as its core tenet. Concerns about change over time then is intrinsic to all psychological inquiry from the standpoint of an ecological perspective. For this reason, ecological psychology is, by its very nature, a developmental psychology. Still, one might pragmatically designate a certain subset of work from an ecological perspective as developmental when its emphasis is on changes in psychological functioning within a certain age range anywhere over the course of the life span. Research to date emphasizing changes in perception-action with age as a marker has been limited mostly to the period between infancy through early childhood. One way to organize this body of research is with reference to features of the environment toward which activity is directed and coordinated. If we do so, the following lines of inquiry
James Gibson's final book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979/1986) may have had ... more James Gibson's final book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979/1986) may have had the unintended effect of overshadowing his prior, seminal work, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966). This circumstance is unfortunate because in many ways the final book has a narrower focus. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems not only considers other perceptual systems in addition to vision but also it is in this work where Gibson most fully lays out his ecological approach to psychology. In doing so, the book gives more explicit attention to human evolution and sociocultural processes than do his other writings. Although Gibson establishes a framework for considering perception-action commonalities across species, he also examines some of the ways in which perceiving among human and nonhuman animals differ. Among those issues examined are how tool use in the production of pictures and representations has contributed to cultural change, how language can affect perceiving, and how social structures are perceived. The ongoing debate over the conceptual status of affordances is reexamined from the point of view of sociohistorical processes.
This investigation examined the hypothesis that the evaluation of the affective content of a film... more This investigation examined the hypothesis that the evaluation of the affective content of a film scene would be determined by the interaction of scene content and film cutting rate. Two simple narrative films were shot differing only in the emotions expressed (happiness or anger), and two edited versions of each film, a fast and a slow cutting rate version, were prepared. Subjects evaluated the principles in the films as well as their own feelings while watching the films, using Mehrabian and Russell's emotional state inventory. The results supported the interaction hypothesis, as indicated by the findings that the faster cutting enhanced the positive ratings of a speaker in the “happy” film, but led to enhanced negative ratings of the same speaker when he presented an angry demeanor. In the angry scenes, where there may be multiple layers of meaning and emotional content, the interaction effects were more complex, but still largely consistent with the hypothesis.
Take the case of the perception of landscape. A photograph of a landscape captures from a single ... more Take the case of the perception of landscape. A photograph of a landscape captures from a single observation point and in an instant of time, the array of forms before the camera lens. Likewise, an individual can adopt, momentarily, a similar attitude with respect to a ...
Behavior settings" are generated by joint actions of individuals in conjunction with the milieu f... more Behavior settings" are generated by joint actions of individuals in conjunction with the milieu features (or affordances) that are available. The reported research explores the hypothesis that the identity or meaning of a behavior setting can be perceived by means of the patterns of action collectively generated by the setting's participants. A set of computer animations was created based on detailed observation of activities in everyday settings. Three experiments were conducted to assess whether perceivers could extract "structure from motion" (in this case, collective actions) that was specific to the particular behavior setting displayed by way of the animations. Two experiments assessed whether individuals could accurately perceive the identity of the behavior settings with such displays, and a third experiment indirectly examined this possibility by evaluating whether setting possibilities and constraints were recognized. The results offered some support for the hypothesis, and suggested several refinements in how to conceptualize a typology of behavior settings. An ecological approach to place perception is also discussed.
Route-learning, considered from an ecological approach to perception, is posited to involve the d... more Route-learning, considered from an ecological approach to perception, is posited to involve the detection of information over time that specifies a path from one location to another. The study examines whether the use of a visual navigational system (e.g., GPS) may impede route-learning by drawing attention away from transitions along a path that serve as information for way-finding. Virtual reality (VR) technology used in conjunction with an extensive, detailed environmental simulation was employed to explore this possibility. One group of participants drove a simulated car in VR along a designated path while relying on visual GPS guidance. It was expected that use of the GPS display would draw attention away from temporally continuous path information. A second group initially drove the same route without GPS guidance. Both groups drove the path a second time without navigational assistance. Overall, the percentage of correct actions taken at intersections (transitions) during the...
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