Afordancje kanoniczne w kontekście

Koncepcja afordancji Jamesa Gibsona miała podważyć tradycyjny dualizm tego, co obiektywne, i tego, co subiektywne. Gibson sam podkreślał ciągłość mi��dzy „afordancjami w ogóle” a afordancjami ludzkich artefaktów. Jednak należy zaznaczyć, że istnieje zasadnicza różnica między „afordancjami w ogóle” a „afordancjami kanonicznymi”, związanymi przede wszystkim z artefaktami. Afordancje kanoniczne są konwencjonalne i normatywne. Tylko w tym wypadku ma sens mówienie o afordancji przedmiotu. Krzesła na przykład służą do siedzenia, co nie przeszkadza użyciu ich do wielu innych celów. Wiele nieporozumień powstało w dyskusji nad afordancjami w wyniku (1) nierozpoznania normatywnego statusu kanonicznych afordancji oraz (2) generalizacji tego szczególnego przypadku

Changing the game:exploring infants' participation in early play routines

Play has proved to have a central role in children’s development, most notably in rule learning (Piaget, 1965; Sutton-Smith, 1979) and negotiation of roles and goals (Garvey, 1972; Bruner et al., 1976). Yet very little research has been done on early play. The present study focuses on early social games, i.e. vocal-kinetic play routines that mothers use to interact with infants from very early on. We explored 3-month-old infants and their mothers performing a routine game first in the usual way, then in two violated conditions: without gestures and without sound. The aim of the study is to investigate infants’ participation and expectations in the game and whether this participation is affected by changes in the multimodal format of the game. Infants’ facial expressions, gaze and body movements were coded to measure levels of engagement and affective state across the three conditions. Results showed a significant decrease in Limbs Movements and expressions of Positive Affect, an increase in Gaze Away and in Stunned Expression when the game structure was violated. These results indicate that the violated game conditions were experienced as less engaging, either because of an unexpected break in the established joint routine, or simply because they were weaker versions of the same game. Overall, our results suggest that structured, multimodal play routines may constitute interactional contexts that only work as integrated units of auditory and motor resources, representing early communicative contexts which prepare the ground for later, more complex multimodal interactions, such as verbal exchanges

Increasing Perspectival Obliqueness Increases the Leaning Tower Illusion

The leaning tower illusion is a perceptual illusion in which two identical images of a tower photographed from below appear to diverge when juxtaposed. We manipulated the perceived obliqueness of the (upright) St Mark bell tower in Venice by modifying two parameters both related to the position of the camera with respect to the tower: (a) increasing the peripherality of the tower and (b) reducing the distance between the camera and the tower. The resulting images clearly show that the illusory leaning effect increases as a function of the obliqueness. Another crucial condition for the leaning tower effect must be that the twin images are perceived as parts of a unitary display: The illusion increases when the distance between the photos is progressively increased, but beyond a certain level of separation, the integration of the images should, of course, break down, and the illusion vanish