The Modern Legacy of Gibson's Affordances for the Sciences of Organisms

Madhur Mangalam is Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomechanics at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA. His research interests include nonlinear dynamical principles governing perception-action and embodied/embedded cognition and the development of nonlinear analytical methods that can aid in discovering these principles. Alen Hajnal is Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Southern Mississippi, USA. Dr. Hajnal studies the interaction between body movements and perception in relation to the ecological theory of affordances. Damian G. Kelty-Stephen is Faculty Member at the Psychology Department at the State University of New York at New Paltz, USA. His research interests include perception-action relationships, embodied/embedded cognition, and the nonlinear dynamics that link them together.

PART I: Ontology and Epistemology of Affordances 1. Why It Matters That Affordances Are Relations 2. The Sociomaterial Theory of Affordances 3. When It Comes to Affordances, What Do Animals Know and How Do They Know It? 4. Mental Action and the Scope of Affordance Perception 5. An Affordance-Based Approach to the Origins of Concepts 6. Toward an Ecological Theory of Time PART II: The Role of Exploratory Activity and Scale in Perception of Affordances 7. The Dynamics of Affordance Emergence and Perception 8. Description of the World That Agential Systems Fit Into 9. The Role of Exploratory Activity in Affordance Perception 10. Scaling Up: Lawfulness of Affordances Requires Independence From Any Single “Scale of Behavior” PART III: Affordances Through the Lens of Neuroscience 11. Affordance Switching in Self-Organizing Brain-Body-Environment Systems 12. What Is NExT for Affordances? Taking Brains Seriously in Organism-Environment Systems 13. Affordance and Tool Use: A Neurocognitive Approach 14. From Turing to Gibson: Implications of Affordances for the Sciences of Organisms PART IV: Applications of the Ecological Theory of Affordances 15. Understanding Skilled Adaptive Behavior: The Role of Action, Perception and Cognition in an Ecological Dynamics Perspective 16. Disability Through the Lens of Affordances: A Promising Pathway for Transforming Physical Therapy Practice 17. “I Got All I Need to Know About Affordances From Norman”: What Engineers, Designers, and Architects Need to Know About Affordances 18. Perception of Affordances in Interaction With Autonomous Systems 19. On Affordances and Their Entailment for Autonomous Robotic Systems