The psychophysics of remembered affordances

The current study is a novel investigation of remembered affordances using the analytic framework of memory psychophysics, which generally demonstrates memory degradation for stimulus magnitudes even after short delay intervals. Participants made perceived and remembered reports of the affordance reach-with-ability and length (a proportional physical dimension of reach-with-ability) of a series of rods. The results were similar to past research on affordance perception, demonstrating a lower scaling exponent (i.e., discriminability) for remembered reach-with-ability than remembered length. Furthermore, we found no evidence of memory decay in either length or reach-with-ability after a 1 min delay interval with a distractor task. The findings demonstrate that memory psychophysics offers a useful framework to study perception, memory, and cognition.