Manipulating Environmental Affordances via Intrinsic Measurement: Evidence from Sensorimotor Brain Dynamics

According to the view of ecological psychology, affordances are perceived directly through the interaction between the observer and the environment, and thus body-scaled. Considering the actions from different object-agent distances, Tosoni and colleagues have provided a conceptual distinction concerning two types of affordances: macro affordances (also called environmental affordance) and micro affordances. Both of these two types of affordances have been investigated in psychological research since the beginning of this century. However, most of the environmental affordances have not yet been manipulated with a body-scaled setting in the prior research protocol. Inspired by the intrinsic measurement introduced by ecological psychologist Warren (1984) and focusing on environmental affordances, the present study adapted the task of Djebbara et al. (2019) by defining transitional affordance as the body-door height ratios. The current results from subjective data, EEG data and behavioral data showed that affordance can be manipulated intrinsically and covaried with agents’ experience, perception and motor interaction. The perception of environmental affordances was based on intrinsic optical information for the relationship between environmental properties and capacities of the observer’s own action system. It thus provides empirical support for the need to link ecological psychology and neuro-architecture in experimental protocols.