ABSTRACT
Affordances are action possibilities defined by the relationship between the organism and the environment. The relationship has traditionally been described by geometric properties of the environment and morphological properties of the body (such as arm length and leg length). The goal of empirical affordance research has been to identify invariant properties that unambiguously map onto perceptual responses. The details of information detection have received less attention, even though perception unfolds as a dynamic body activity as perceptual systems sample ambient energy arrays. A significant minority of recent studies investigated exploratory activity in affordance perception tasks. The results showed that exploratory activity plays a crucial role in facilitating information detection and that the patterns of movements during exploration are best characterized by complex measures, such as multifractality. This finding points to the conjecture that the complexity of exploratory activity across multiple time- and spatial scales is a catalyst for information detection. The current contribution reviews the literature about the links between exploration and perception and conjectures that the effects of exploration are exhibited across multiple scales of the organism-environment system. The effects of complex exploration across micro- and macro-scales call for a reform in psychophysical methods and questions the value of the concept of perceptual thresholds in studying perception and action systems.
