Affordances

How we look at the world matters — if we look for possibilities, we tend to find them. If we imagine things are impossible, it becomes harder to see what is actually there…. and sometimes it depends on what we are looking for…

Mind Hacks: Rock climbing hacks! (now with added speculation)

Psychologists have something they call affordances (Gibson, 1977, 1986), which are features of the environment which seem to ‘present themselves’ as available for certain actions. Chairs afford being sat on, hammers afford hitting things with. The term captures an observation that there is something very obviously action-orientated about perception. We don’t just see the world, we see the world full of possibilities. And this means that the affordances in the environment aren’t just there, they are there because we have some potential to act (Stoffregen, 2003). If you are frail and afraid of falling then a handrail will look very different from if you are a skateboarder, or a freerunner. Psychology typically divides the jobs the mind does up into parcels : ‘perception’, (then) ‘decision making’, (then) ‘action’. But if you take the idea of affordances seriously it gives lie to this neat division. Affordances exist because action (the ‘last’ stage) affects perception (the ‘first’ stage). Can we experimentally test this intuition, is there really an effect of action on perception? One good example is Oudejans et al (1996) who asked baseball fielders to judge were a ball would land, either just watching it fall or while running to catch it. A model of the mind that didn’t involve affordances might think that it would be easier to judge where a ball would land if you were standing still; after all, it’s usually easier to do just one thing rather than two. This, however, would be wrong. The fielders were more accurate in their judgments — perceptual predictions basically — when running to catch the ball, in effect when they could use base their judgments on the affordances of the environment produced by their actions, rather than when passively observing the ball.

One of the things I most enjoy about Tao is the opening up of the mind to see more potential around you — the world becomes a place where so much more is possible. And yet, there are new possibilities every day, and if you don’t take advantage of them, so what? More come along tomorrow… it makes life both more full and less stressful, less limiting. There is much less that has to be done right now. The world becomes one big affordance….