The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between culture, affordance and proficiency. Further, to study the possibility of a cognitive gap between artists and the audience they design for, akin to the Designer-User gap in interaction design and user experience research. In order to contextualize the issue studied, relevant theories in ecological psychology, visual literacy, image interpretation and cognitive models are presented and discussed alongside contemporary industry issues that may have arisen from this type of cognitive gap. As artist and audience might have these vastly different interpretations of identical visual material, conveying or communicating specific design ideas or aesthetics may be compromised or lost in translation, negatively influencing visual communication. The study compared a set of individuals matching either the label of concept artist or target game audience on their unmediated reactions and mental heuristics when encountering a novel design from a familiar genre, using a method of concurrent verbalization. Results were discussed and compared to prevailing theories in cognition, user experience design and the presented research question. Said results indicate that there are distinct variations between how artists and audience apply their heuristics for unmediated design interpretation, although it also provides a few tentative suggestions as to a few methods in which said issue could be circumvented or surmounted.

Perception is a fundamental function because it allows organisms to be in contact with the environment and adjust to environmental conditions. Humans also possess higher intellectual functions, which allow for elaborate handling of perceptually obtained information. The thesis concerns a distinction between an inferential ("cognitive") mode and a (direct-)perceptual mode of apprehension, and a notion of perceptual skill acquisition as a transition from the inferential to the perceptual mode. The mode distinction and the mode-transition model was formulated by Runeson, Juslin, and Olsson (2000) within the ecological direct-perception framework (Gibson, 1966, 1979). The modes of apprehension were investigated in an experimental paradigm that concerned visual perception of the relative mass of two colliding objects. The relative mass is specified by an optical variable in the collision movement pattern, which observers may pick up while functioning in the perceptual mode. However, novices often rely on other, nonspecifying, optical variables that may constitute cues that are used in the inferential mode (Runeson et al., 2000). Four tentative mode indicators were employed: participants' realism of confidence, introspective mode reports, amplitudes of brain event-related potentials, and response times. Generally, the results did not support the mode-transition model of skill acquisition. Furthermore, results suggested that reliance both on the specifying and nonspecifying variables might have occurred either in the inferential or in the perceptual mode. However, the mode indicators may not have captured mode as intended. For instance, the discriminability of used optical variables, and not the mode of apprehension, may have affected both amplitudes of event-related potentials and mode reports. It is argued that the mode-transition model and the distinction between two modes of apprehension should be further investigated employing other methodologies, and, furthermore, that the mode distinction has a place within an ecological framework.

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Contemporary neuroscientific evidence indicates that unrestricted movement and gesture enhance children’s physical, social and cognitive development by engaging them with the external properties of their environments. Current understanding of children’s engagement with indoor environments is limited. This knowledge gap matters because children’s health, social abilities and cognitive development may be compromised in physical environments that inhibit rather than enhance their movement capacities. This gap is especially problematic for physically disabled children because their motor impairments, exclusionary societal attitudes, safety concerns and environmental barriers curtail their movement. In this study, I describe and interpret the relationship between disabled and non-disabled children’s movement and a kindergarten classroom. Their bodies were conceptualized according to Deleuze’s premise that nothing can be known about bodies until they demonstrate what they can do (1988). The classroom was conceptualized according to Gibson’s theory of affordances, which posits that people and environments are inextricably related (1979). I used a choreographic perspective underpinned by Manning’s philosophy of relational movement (2009) to accentuate the dynamic reciprocity between children’s bodies and the classroom. Eight disabled and 12 non-disabled children participated in this interdisciplinary, ethnographic study. Data were elicited through observations, video recordings and semi-structured interviews. I developed a taxonomy of indoor affordances or ‘compositional elements’ to categorize classroom objects/features that children discovered and actualized through their movement interactions. Subsequently, I observed a dance-in-the-making that led to deeper understandings of the relational and emergent properties of these interactions. Findings suggest that assemblages of bodies, objects and features trigger dynamic movement, and indicate that disabled and non-disabled children alike discover and creatively assemble affordances to facilitate their movement. Overall, my findings recast children’s body-environment interactions and contribute to understandings about environmental features that enhance or inhibit movement capacities. This knowledge could be used to design i) learning environments that are redolent of movement possibilities, ii) interventions to enhance children’s physical, social and cognitive capacities, and iii) education and rehabilitation strategies that encourage them to explore, navigate and shape their environments.

In this thesis, we reviewed the affordance concept for autonomous robot control and proposed that invariant features of objects that support a specific affordance can be learned. We used a physics-based robot simulator to study the reachability affordance on the simulated KURT3D robot model. We proposed that, through training, the values of each feature can be split into strips, which can then be used to detect the relevant features and their characteristics. Our analysis showed that it is possible to achieve higher prediction accuracy on the affordance support of novel objects by using only the relevant features. This is an important gain, since failures can have high costs in robotics and better prediction accuracy is desired.

The thesis seeks to develop an account of collaborative activities within the framework of ecological realism—an approach to psychology developed by James J. Gibson in the course of work on visual perception. Two main questions are addressed; one ontological, and one methodological. The ontological question is: given that collaborative activities take place within an environment, what kinds of structure must this environment contain? The response emphasizes the importance of relations which exist between entities, and which connect a given perceiver-actor with the other objects and individuals in its surroundings, and with the relations between those entities. It is held that activities take place within a field of relations. This description draws on the radical empiricist doctrine that relations are real, are external, and are directly perceivable. The present proposal insists that, in addition to being directly perceivable, relations can also be directly acted upon: throwing a ball for a dog is acting on a relation between dog and ball in space. The relational field account of collaboration naturally extends to an account of speaking: people, through their history of acting in an environment populated by other speakers, come to stand in a set of relations with objects and events around them, and these relations can be directly acted upon by others through the use of verbal actions. Verbal actions serve to direct the attention of others to relevant aspects of the environment, and this allows us as speakers to coordinate and manage one another’s activity. The methodological question is this: granting that the environment may be structured as a field of relations, how are we to conduct our empirical investigations, such that we can ask precise questions which lead to useful insights about how a given collaborative activity is carried out in practice? The central issue here concerns the concept of the task. Psychologists are in the habit of using this term quite loosely, to denote the actions of an individual or a group, in a laboratory or outside. This creates confusion in discussions of collaborative phenomena: who is the agent of a ‘collaborative task’? The definition offered here states that a task is a researcher-defined unit of study that corresponds to a change in the structure of the environment that has a characteristic pattern and that is meaningful from the first-person perspective of a particular actor. On this definition, the task is a tool that allows ecological psychologists to carve up the problem space into specific, tractable questions; the task is the equivalent of the cognitivist’s mental module. Task-oriented psychology encourages us to ask the question: which specific resources is the individual making use of in controlling this particular activity? The methodology is developed through an examination of the alarm calling behaviour of vervet monkeys, which is explained in terms of actions on the relational field, and through an analysis of corpus data from a laboratory-based collaborative assembly game. The relational field model promises to provide a way of studying social and collaborative activities on ecological realist principles. The concluding chapter identifies two particular areas in which the model might fruitfully be developed: in the study of learning, and in the theory of designing objects and spaces for interaction.