Imagine you and a professional climber are looking at a steep wall. Or imagine you and a professional surfer are looking at the ocean with big waves. Do you and the climber (or the surfer) "see" the very same thing? Well, of course in a certain sense you do - both you and the climber see the wall; and both you and the surfer see the ocean. However, these experts (climber or surfer) can "perceive" something that you do not (fully) perceive. The climber does not just see the wall and the bricks, but also the climbing opportunities or affordances that they offer, and which are largely invisible to you. Similarly, the surfer does not just see the big waves, but also surfing opportunities. Long ago J. Gibson (1979) coined the term "affordances" to mean "what it [the environment] offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill."
But what is exactly that experts "see" and you cannot? How can we measure and characterize it formally? How does the brain processes affordances and interactive opportunities for action (and what the interactive nature of affordances implies for the notion of "internal representation", e.g., (how) does the brain "represent" affordances? or just uses affordances)? Is it possible to "extract" affordances from an expert (e.g., a climber or surfer) and show them to a non-expert - and what this implies? My new project, funded by the Naval International Cooperative Opportunities in Science and Technology (NICOP) -- ONR, tries to answer those and other questions, using a combined experimental and computational modeling approach.
References
Gordon J., Maselli A., Lancia G.L., Thiery T., Cisek P., Pezzulo G. (2021) The road towards understanding embodied decisions. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews [link]
Pezzulo, G., Cisek P. (2016) Navigating the Affordance Landscape: Feedback Control as a Process Model of Behavior and Cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20 (6), 414-424 [link]
J. J. Gibson (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), Boston.