Guest Editorial Special Issue on Affordances

The concept of affordances appeared in psychology during the late 60s, as an alternative perspective on the visual perception of the environment. More precisely, the term affordances was introduced by J. J. Gibson in 1966 [items 1)-3) of the Appendix]. Gibson defines the affordances of an object as “what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.” What the objects afford to the agent are action possibilities that are directly perceived through vision, in a precategorical and subconscious way, without the need to construct a fully detailed model of the world or to perform semantic reasoning or explicit object recognition. Central to Gibson’s theory is the notion that the sensorimotor capabilities of the agent dramatically influence perception: the concept of affordances is “something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.” Notably, the human ability to perceive affordances emerges gradually during development, and it is the outcome of exploratory and observational learning; as this ability appears, predicting the effects of the actions becomes possible as well, eventually leading to problem solving skills.