Direct perception and the forgotten footnote in Norman’s affordance theory.
If you come from an interaction design background, you probably think about “affordance” in terms of those annoying door handles, or cupboards that don’t seem to open, or interface buttons which are not clickable. All those annoying design faults that Don Norman so eloquently described in ‘The Design of Everyday Things’.
So it might be surprising to discover that Don Norman’s original account of affordances didn’t quite tell the whole story of what they are. In fact, it told the opposite. To understand why, we have to first take a look at the earlier editions of ‘The Design (Psychology) of Everyday Things’. In it he described affordances as:
“properties of things, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possible be used.” (POET, 1988; DOET, 2003)
Makes sense. BUT, hidden away in a little known footnote Norman also said this:
“The notion of affordance and the insights it provides originated with J.J.Gibson, a psychologist interested in how people see the world. I believe that affordances result from the mental interpretation of things, based on our past knowledge and experience applied to our perception on the things about us. My view is somewhat in conflict with the views of many Gibsonian psychologists, but this internal debate within modern psychology is of little relevance here.” (DOET, 1988, 2003)
So what’s that all about, and why is it such an important footnote?
Indirect vs Direct Perception
What Don Norman was describing in this footnote is a theory of perception which uses mental representations. According to Wikipedia:
The representational theory of mind postulates the actual existence of mental representations which act as intermediaries between the observing subject and the objects.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_representation).
As an illustrative example lets take a look at the picture below:
This shows a subject observing an object through sensory information. This information is considered “impoverished” (incomplete) as the retinal images formed by the distal stimulus (the teapot) are inverted, two dimensional, geometrically ambiguous and noisy. As we “see” the world in complete three-dimensional glory, the brain must somehow process or predict the missing information (based on knowledge and prior experience) to reconstruct an accurate inner model of the external world. As the subject’s experience of the world is therefore mediated through internal representations this came to be know as ‘indirect perception’.
Representationism, or the cognitivist explanation of the mind, may seem like an intuitive way to understand how our brain interprets the world (it certainly did to Norman). But some outright reject this idea, none less so than our friend J.J.Gibson and the Gibsonian psychologists who promote ‘direct perception’.
So lets examine this alternative theory in a bit more detail:
Direct perception rejects representations and this has some conceptual implications, as illustrated above. Firstly, for Gibson, perception does not start with static retinal images formed from photons of light randomly striking our eyes. Perception, instead, begins as an active process predicated on our ability to discover infinite patterns of structured information as we move about in the world. This process does not produce static, meaningless and impoverished sensory data, but dynamic and meaningful ecological information.
In fact, this information is so meaningful that we do not need representations to process, predict or embellish it, instead ecological information can specify affordances — behaviourally relevant properties and features of the world. And these affordances are the real product of our perception!
Mind blowing, right?
Well, yes, but that’s not quite the whole story. To understand the consequences of direct perception we now need to explore the concept of ecological information a bit more.
Direct perception and ecological information
Ecological information is a very important part of Gibsonian psychology (just as much so as affordances) and to prove that here’s a quote from Gibson himself:
“The central question for the theory of affordances is not whether they exist and are real, but whether information is available in the ambient light for perceiving them” (Gibson, 1979)
This ‘ecological information’, unlike sensory information, is concerned with invariant structures and patterns of energy (light, sound waves, vibrations etc) which communicate the meaning of things (i.e. possibilities for action) as you explore the world. Gibson felt that this was important conceptually because perception should be meaningfully coupled with action (see a teapot; make tea). In contrast, perception should not be about passively experiencing meaningless sensations. Cue another quote, this time from Heras-Escribano:
“Sensations are the qualitative product of the passive reception of worldly impingements, while ecological information shows the opportunities for acting in the environment.” (Heras-Escribano, 2019)
So to illustrate this practically, imagine standing in a fog filled room. Even though your visual senses are stimulated a fog filled room doesn’t necessarily tell you anything useful about your environment. It is only when the fog is lifted and when you can confidently situate yourself in that space, that you are presented with a rich assortment of informational structure which give rise to meaning — you are now perceiving the features of ecological information.
Specificity and conventions
So far in this post we have learnt that: 1) affordances structure meaning and value in the world; 2) these “possibilities for action” can be communicated through ecological information (e.g. invariant structures and patterns in light, vibrations etc); 3) as observers our actions are guided by actively perceiving ecological information.
This principle is called “specificity” (note it also holds in reverse) and was first proposed by the academics Turvey, Shaw, Reed and Mace. Turvey et al used it as a basis for responding to criticism about direct perception from those pesky cognitivists: (Turvey et al, 1981).
Specificity is important because it aims to underpin ecological principles through “lawful” relationships, in other words, it aims to ground Gibsonian theory in a scientifically rigorous framework.
However, as we seem to find with Gibsonian theory, this may be problematic, as most recently highlighted in an academic paper by Bruineberg, Chemero and Rietveld:
“Some of Gibson’s most influential later followers (e.g. Turvey et al. 1981) focused on information provided by lawful relationships between structures in the environment and patterns in light, vibrations, and the like. However, importantly, lawful relations are not sufficient to account for the richness and diversity of the affordances…affordances in human social relations are not lawfully specified by the energy in the environment, but are determined in part by socio-cultural practices, such as conventions and customs, or other regularities.” (Bruineberg et al, 2018)
To overcome this problem Bruineberg et al introduce the notion of ‘general ecological information’, within a relational account of affordances:
“General ecological information is any regularity in the ecological niche between aspects of the environment, x and y, such that the occurrence of aspect x makes the occurrence of aspect y likely. Because of the regular relation between the aspects of the (sociomaterial) environment x and y, general ecological information allows an animal to couple to a distal (i.e. not sensorily present) aspect of the sociomaterial environment.” (Bruineberg et al, 2018)
So as an example, there is the question of how one knows about the presence of beer in a fridge when the door is closed, because there is no lawful ecological information to specify it. But with general ecological information a fridge can afford beer because we can perceive this information through conventions — it’s likely that there is beer in the fridge because that’s usually where I get it from!
So, problem solved, right? We can perceive non-sensorily present stuff through conventions?
Alas, not quite!
As ever, some commentators worry about the use of conventions in this way — cue yet another quote, this time from Heras-Escribano:
“The introduction of affordances as based on conventions is a serious threat to the scientific character of ecological psychology: If we expand the notion of affordance to refer to cultural conventions and not only to scientific and lawful information, I think that the idea of affordance will become meaningless.” (Heras-Escribano, 2019)
Oh dear…
Further criticism of ‘general ecological information’ is also address by Wilson (2018) who argues that affordances cannot be relational (see previous post on types of affordances) and support conventions without undermining the foundations of direct perception. Instead he points to a paper by Golonka (2015) which suggests that conventions can work — but only when linked to an account of affordances which use dispositional properties. Final quote, I promise:
“When an organism uses law-based information about affordances, it organizes its behavior with respect to the property in the world that causes the information. When an organism uses conventional information, it organizes its behavior with respect to evolutionarily, experimentally, ecologically, or socioculturally maintained conventions that link the information to properties or events.” (Golonka, 2015)
Note the key point here is that conventions are not part of affordances par se — they are ecological information linked to dispositional properties of things. So we need to be careful about how we define those pesky affordances…
And I’ll leave it there before our brains explode.
Back to Norman’s affordance footnote
I suspect those who started to read this post (because I dangled a Don Norman link-baity title in front of you) may be disappointed at this point. And I’m sorry for that.
But Norman’s footnote in the historical story of affordance theory is extremely important for highlighting what he neglected to (initially) tell you. By ignoring the (relevant) modern psychological debates about theories of perception, Norman underwrote affordances with indirect perception.
But this is misleading.
Affordances are a Gibsonian construct which underwrite direct perception. And although there are conflicting Gibsonian accounts of affordance based on propertied or relational ontologies, what both sides can agree on is that affordances and indirect perception do not go hand in hand — in fact they really, really don’t like each other. Not one bit. Not even a tiny bit. They are 100% incompatible.
So perhaps in hindsight footnotes aren't the best place to sweep things things under the metaphorical carpet, because eventually we have to take all the sweepings out again to examine the shards of broken affordances.
References
- Norman, D. (1988). The Psychology of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition.
- Norman, D. (2003). The Design of Everyday Things.
- Gibson, J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
- Heras-Escribano, M. (2019). The Philosophy of Affordances.
- Turvey, M. et al. (1981). Ecological laws of perceiving and acting: In reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn.
- Bruineberg, J. et al. (2018). General ecological information supports engagement with affordances for ‘higher’ cognition.
- Wilson, A. (2018). Information is Relational, Affordances Are Not.
- Golonka, S. (2015). Laws and Conventions in Language-Related Behaviors.
About this blog
This blog aims to provide a simple and non-nonsense account of affordance theory — from the ground up. If you like this story please clap and share using the links below! Thank you for reading.
