ABSTRACT
Perhaps one of the most complex issues surrounding the theory of affordances concerns their ontology. In Gibson’s (1979/1986) account an affordance does not refer to either subjective properties of an agent or objective properties of the world, but to the relation between the world and agent. An affordance describes a potential for action—the capacity of an object or environmental surface to enable an agent to perform an action. In that respect, affordances are animal-specific. They exist relative to the action capabilities of particular actors. Nevertheless, according to Gibson an affordance possesses ontological reality independently of the particular actor and the actor’s intentions. This suggests that an agent should be as capable of perceiving affordances for himself/herself as perceiving affordances for other agents. However, little evidence supports this hypothesis. Until recently (Stoffregen, Gorday, Sheng, & Flynn, 1999), the ability to perceive affordances for other agents has received little attention in the literature compared to the abundance of research on the ability to perceive affordances for oneself. This project extends a recent line of research that has shown people can perceive whether they could use steps of different heights to reach an object suspended at various heights. We explored the perceiver’s capacity to perceive whether another actor could reach an object if the actor were to stand on steps of varying heights, and whether those perceptions would be influenced by the actor’s reaching height. Furthermore, we explored whether the perception of the affordance was affected by the distance between the actor and the participant.
