ABSTRACT
James Gibson coined the term affordances to capture what the environment offers to animals. The concept is one of the most important and revolutionary in ecological science; it is also intuitively clear and appealing. This is an easy question and should be obvious to all ecological psychologists: affordances are not created in the act of perception; they exist independent of it. The theory of affordances is part of the ecological ontology: it is a statement of what is available in the world to be perceived. Among action-related affordances, one could include that the ground affords walking on, stairs afford climbing, vertical gaps afford passing through or driving a wheelchair through, horizontal gaps afford stepping over, a nearby object affords reaching, and so forth, to cite a few examples from the affordance literature. Danger, perceiving, and nutrition are obviously not actions in the sense of coordinated movements, guided by information, in the service of some goal.
