The psychophysics of remembered affordances

The current study is a novel investigation of remembered affordances using the analytic framework of memory psychophysics, which generally demonstrates memory degradation for stimulus magnitudes even after short delay intervals. Participants made perceived and remembered reports of the affordance reach-with-ability and length (a proportional physical dimension of reach-with-ability) of a series of rods. The scaling exponent (i.e., discriminability, sensitivity, certainty) for length reports decreased after a 1 min retention interval and distractor task, while the scaling exponents for perceived and remembered reports of reach-with-ability did not differ. The findings demonstrate that memory psychophysics offers a useful framework to study affordance cognition. It also adds to the literature that demonstrates the direct perception of affordances and the unique stability (lack of memory degradation) for affordances compared to basic physical dimensions.