Chapter Six - Does the Concept of Affordance Add Anything to Explanations of Stimulus–Response Compatibility Effects?

Abstract

Abstract The concept of affordance has been increasingly applied to stimulus–response compatibility effects over the past 25 years, for which most explanations have been from an information-processing perspective. We consider affordance accounts offered from the ecological perception approach associated with J. J. Gibson and from the information-processing approach (which we call representational affordance accounts). With regard to the latter, we discuss whether any value is gained by incorporating a concept from one worldview (ecological psychology) into explanations within another worldview (information processing). We discuss shortcomings of the representational affordance approach in general, including lack of clear justification and definition for the concept of affordance representation, and critically evaluate several lines of research that have been interpreted as support for specific affordances. We conclude that there is little evidence to justify application of the concept of affordance to laboratory studies of stimulus–response compatibility effects, either in its ecological form or when it is divorced from direct perception and instead paired with a representational/computational approach.