Visual and Haptic Perception of Affordances of Feelies

Abstract

Most human-made objects are designed with a particular function and a particular user in mind. This means that most objects have well-defined affordances. An important question that remains unanswered concerns the perception of affordances of objects that were not created for a specific purpose. Investigating perception of affordances of such objects would provide insight into how affordances are perceived via exploratory activity. In addition, the comparison of perception of affordances of ambiguous objects across vision and haptics would offer a strong test of the lawfulness of information about affordances (i.e., the invariance of such information over transformation). The use of - objects created by Gibson (1962) with no obvious function and unlike any common object - could shed light on these processes. The present study showed that when observers reported potential uses for feelies, modality significantly influenced what kind of affordances were perceived. Specifically, visual exploration reulted in more noun labels (e.g. toy) and haptic exploration resulted in more verb labels (i.e. throw). These results suggested that overlapping, but distinct classes of action possibilities are readily perceivable using vision and haptics. Semantic network analyses revealed that visual exploration resulted in object-oriented responses focused on object identification, whereas haptic exploration resulted in action-oriented responses. Cluster analyses confirmed these results. Affordance labels produced in the visual condition were more consistent, used fewer descriptors, were less diverse, but were more novel than those in the haptic condition. How the unique shape of feelies influences affordance judgments is currently being investigated, but the multiple convex and concave surface regions could be critical in providing information about affordances, with different patterns of surface curvature specifying different affordances.