A Rich Landscape of Affordances

By Erik Rietveld, Julian Kiverstein. Sociology of power, 2014

701 citations recorded by the source corpus.

How broad is the class of affordances we can perceive? Affordances (Gibson, 1979/1986) are possibilities for action provided to an animal by the environment—by the substances, surfaces, objects, and other living creatures that surround it. A widespread assumption has been that affordances primarily relate to motor action—to locomotion and manual behaviors such as reaching and grasping. We propose an account of affordances according to which the concept of affordances has a much broader application than has hitherto been supposed. We argue that the affordances an environment offers to an animal are dependent on the skills the animal possesses. By virtue of our many abilities, the landscape of affordances we inhabit as humans is very rich and resourceful.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, History and Philosophy of Science, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2247c50fdc2a91e8b34bb2822b96324ccb01ec04

Citations in the corpus

• On Natural Attunement: Shared Rhythms Between the Brain and the Environment. (2023, unknown): “This approach has revealed numerous important theoretical advances (Djebbara et al., 2022; Rietveld and Kiverstein, 2014; Withagen et al., 2017) and empirical results (Djebbara et al., 2019, 2021; Haken et al., 1985; W. H. J. Warren, 1984).”