Abstract:
Assessing potential affordances of objects is commonplace. Unlike most objects, feelies (Gibson, 1966) were created to have no inherent or obvious affordance properties, making them a valuable resource to investigate unbiased perception of affordances. Ten of the original feelies were scanned and printed via 3D printer to be used as stimuli (Phillips & Egan, 2016; Norman, et al., 2012). The material used for printing was hard plastic (polylactic acid) with 70% of the interior filled in, and the printing increment was 0.2mm. 18 students were presented ten feelies to explore through vision alone or touch alone (haptically) and were asked to list any possible affordances for each object. Each object was presented a total of three times through a series of three blocks, resulting in a total of 30 trials per participant. Participants were given unlimited time to explore and provide answers. Responses were audio recorded and later transcribed by researchers. The most frequent words used to describe affordances were ‘throwing’, ‘spinning’, ‘holding’, ‘toy’, ‘catching’, ‘decoration’, ‘sliding’, and ‘tossing’, among many others. Analyses of the reported affordances showed that visual exploration and haptic exploration yielded different patterns of responses and frequencies. In the visual condition, there was more overlap in affordances listed across objects. In the haptic condition there was less overlap in affordances. This suggests that participants found feelies to look more similar than they felt in terms of afforded actions. Participants listed significantly more affordances for each feelie in the haptic condition compared to the visual condition. Participant response times were also measured, and reaction times were longer in the haptic condition than in the visual condition, but only for certain objects. This suggests that the differences in response time have more to do with the objects themselves than any differences between perceptual modalities. The results were interpreted according to two factors: 1) given mechanical contact, touch offers more immediate sensory experience than vision, and 2) haptic and visual exploration are qualitatively different and result in similarly different patterns of affordance perception.
Alen Hajnal:
Alen Hajnal is an associate professor of cognitive psychology who studies sensory systems using psychophysical methods, with a special emphasis on visual and haptic perception. In his experiments Dr. Hajnal analyzes the coordination and interaction between body movements and perception through the concept of affordances. His research methods include virtual reality technology and motion capture systems. His research interests span the analysis of physical and sensory features of complex visual patterns. In the last decade Dr. Hajnal has published more than 30 journal articles in internationally recognized peer reviewed journals such as the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, Ecological Psychology, and Experimental Brain Research. In August of 2019 he became a member of the editorial board of Frontiers in Psychology: Quantitative Psychology and Measurement. He is the director of the Perception Action and Cognition Lab at the School of Psychology at the University of Southern Mississippi. Since 2018 he has been the coordinator of the Brain and Behavior PhD program at his department. Dr. Hajnal is currently on sabbatical leave at the Technical University of Budapest in Hungary working on virtual reality projects and studying ecological optics.