What is an affordance? 40 years later
Introduction
Forty years have passed since Gibson (1977) coined the term “affordance” to refer to the action possibilities offered to an animal by the environment with reference to the animal’s action capabilities. Since then, the notion of affordance has gained huge popularity, becoming a common term in the jargon of researchers, but also students in psychology or neurosciences. There is hardly a week that passes without a colleague saying during lunchtime: “Hey, did you see that? I grasped and used the fork because of its affordance!” As many popular notions, the paradox is that the notion of affordance raises serious theoretical issues, notably when the time comes to define precisely what it is. The fact is that it has acquired a multitude of connotations, generating confusion in the published literature, particularly in the field of tool use. The risk is that it becomes progressively useless, losing its heuristic value by eventually meaning everything and its opposite. The reason for us to focus on the literature on tool use is that the notion of affordance is outrageously employed in this literature, not only by scholars studying the underlying neurocognitive bases but also by those interested by tool design. This can explain by the fact that Gibson (1979) himself drew a parallel between the action possibilities offered by the body and those provided by tools. For him, these two kinds of action possibilities could be perceived as affordances.
In this article, we aimed at formulating a more conservative definition of affordance as well as to propose a terminology for the other related concepts in the field of tool use. This terminology should be of primary importance for future research by helping investigators reach an agreement on the use of the notion of affordance and, as a result, integrate more easily their work within a broader theoretical framework for tool use, and to optimally articulate empirical data with a global conceptual system. To demonstrate the necessity of developing such a terminology, we will begin by presenting the discrepancies existing between the major conceptions of affordances in the field of tool use and cognitive neuroscience in light of three key criteria: Action domain, reference frame, and cerebral system. Then, we will discuss our attempt to operationalize affordance and other related concepts of tool use by distinguishing between two levels, namely, the physical level (i.e., what is objectively observable) and the neurocognitive level (i.e., what is subjectively experienced). We will end by opening new avenues for the study of affordances and tool use on the basis of our terminology.
Section snippets
Background
Since Gibson, 1977, Gibson, 1979 coined the term “affordance”, both the theoretical and the empirical literature have used it in various ways. In this section, we review the major conceptions of affordances in the field of tool use and cognitive neuroscience. Before doing so, we start by defining three key criteria (action domain, reference frame and cerebral system) that are particularly useful for highlighting the discrepancies existing between those conceptions.
An attempt to operationalize affordances and related concepts
In this section, we will present an attempt to operationalize the different concepts that have been related to affordances in the field of tool use. Our operationalization is shown in Table 2 and is based on a crucial distinction between a physical and a neurocognitive level. Specifically, this distinction leads us to develop the three action-system model (3AS), assuming that three specific neurocognitive systems (i.e., neurocognitive level: motor control/dorso-dorsal system, mechanical
Open issues
Having operationalized the concept of affordance, we turn to two key issues that can be addressed within 3AS. These issues concern the link between affordances and tool incorporation, and the constraints posed by affordances.
A final word
In this article, we propose a new operationalization of affordance, mainly based on tool use literature. We made this choice because of its huge popularity in this field in which it has generated theoretical confusion, meaning everything and its opposite (see Table 1). By developing 3AS, we suggest a more restricted definition by considering affordances as the description at a physical level of what the environment offers an animal in reference to its biomechanical characteristics. This
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by grants from ANR (Agence Nationale pour la Recherche; Project “Démences et Utilisation d’Outils/Dementia and Tool Use”, ANR-2011-MALZ-006-03; Project “Cognition et économie liée à l’outil/Cognition and tool-use economy” ECOTOOL; ANR-14-CE30-0015-01), and was performed within the framework of the LABEX CORTEX (ANR-11-LABX-0042) of Université de Lyon, within the program “Investissements d’Avenir” (ANR-11- IDEX-0007) operated by the French National Research Agency (ANR).
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