Remembered affordances reflect the fundamentally action-relevant, context-specific nature of visual perception.

Abstract

Ecological psychology suggests the environment is experienced by perceivers in terms of their ability to behave within it-or their affordances. The authors used the remembered-affordance paradigm to evaluate this claim in contrast to an additive model that combined lower-order, action-neutral, perceived properties of the perceiver and environment to compute an affordance. In 2 experiments, participants reported the boundary between actions that were or were not possible (overhead reaching in Experiments 1a and 1b, and minimum aperture pass-through-ability in Experiment 2) while using or not using an implement (a stick). They also reported the length of the implement independent of its use in any action. Reports of stick length were consistently different from action-relevant affordance reports, and the additive model was incapable of accounting for participants' affordance reports. The results are consistent with ecological psychology's claim that affordances are perceived directly and also with embodied and functional approaches to memory, which suggest that the environment is experienced in task-specific and action-relevant terms.