Extending Affordances with Evolutionary Psychology and Connectionist Models: An Essay in Honor of Reuben Baron

Abstract

In introducing Gibson’s construct of the ‘affordance’ to social psychology, Baron and colleagues extended the ecological perspective into a new domain. We here explore how far the notion of the affordance can usefully be extended in social science broadly. We first describe the most orthodox definition and review how Baron and colleagues apply this to social perception. We then explore what it might mean to move beyond direct perception to dynamics that play out over longer time scales. We argue that the value of social affordances often reflects deep motivational currents that prepare the perceptual system to attend to and learn about the information most relevant to fundamental social goals—like avoiding violence, disease, and cheating, or pursuing affiliation, mating and kin-care goals—and that this information must be integrated across events spread out in time. Coupling such systems with a subsymbolic connectionist implementation of perceptual learning, we can extend affordances to implicit memory, and the selective essence of attention to social testing and trait detection, and do so in ways that are quite consistent with Baron’s mature work. In sum, we suggest that Baron’s efforts to broaden the focus of social perception has planted seeds that enrich social and evolutionary psychology but which can expand the focus of ecological psychology as well.