As those versed in ecological psychology know well, Gibson's approach was hard externalist and he made no effort to explain the internal neurological process involved in taking action wrt an affordance. So there is an explanatory gap which afaik, remains to be filled. (That is not to say that conventional internalist explanations do not have explanatory gaps :) I'd like to hear perspectives.
(I only put the ? because the robot told me to).
You are absolutely right. Not only external conditions are important. Very critical functional state of a person, which determines the effectiveness of knowledge. But people often do not pay attention to this "inner" aspect. You are right, the leveling of personalities is unpromising.
Interesting and important issue, really. Gibson indeed left that gap to fill, yet the work in embodied cognition has taken up part of that challenge, I think. Indeed, what one needs is a combination of an expertise/learning-dependent modification of perception of & interactions with the environment - which presents itself differently to an individual as a result. Different views of embodied cognition are discussed by Wilson 2002 ( http://www.springerlink.com/content/gt33335rg5156860/ ) which is helpful here. There are different ways of bridging 'internalist' explanations with externalist ones - I offer an option, that takes expertise as mofidying relevant mechanisms into account, in my 2017 'Drawing on a sculpted space of actions' ( Article Drawing on a Sculpted Space of Actions: Educating for Expert...
)
Very interesting point. I agree both with Prof. Kulchitsky and Dr. Keestra: on one hand functional states can influence susceptibility to affordances (or lack of them) in the environment, but on the other hand expertise can foster familiarity and promote a better understanding/use of affordances. From an ageing perspective, the literature on dementia-friendly environments is providing interesting insights on how individual differences in cognitive status influence the interaction with the surrounding environment (Article Designing Dementia‐Friendly Neighbourhoods: Helping People w...
Also, recent studies exploring eeg activity while interacting with different types of environments will hopefully shed light on the brain processes linked to affordances (Article Older People’s Experiences of Mobility and Mood in an Urban ...
However, exploring these mechanisms over the lifecourse would be useful to answer to understand the role of developmental circumstances.
Thankyou for your replies. All I think more 'applied' that I was hoping for. Machiel - I am unsurprised by the Sculpted Space of Actions you speak of, it tallies with all kinds of skilled improvisatory practices (from artisanal crafts to dance) and with design exploration. But your paper does not get to the core of the question (its not about that).
The fundamental questions and possible answers, as I see it, are these:
1. Are affordances external? In which case the question follows: What are the corpo-neurological (my neologism) event that occur that result in appropriate action? (or inappropriate action).
2. If affordances are internal (as Dennett and many others assume - an error in my opinion) then the notion that the ‘information’ is ‘in the ambient optic array’ is incorrect. If so, are we forced back into an internalist/representationalist/reasoning stance, or are there better explanations?
3. Chemero’s relational formulation goes some distance to resolving the internalist/externalist impasse. And Gallese (et al)’s sensorimotor approaches relieve the ‘brain; of having to come up with solutions in-vacuo, as it were.
4. The emerging body of theory on Bayesian predictive coding (and related ideas) sits well with bottom-up and emergentist approaches, and provides a way out of the Cartesian theatre.
- Badges
- Science topic