Vol.:(0123456789)
1 3
Experimental Brain Research (2018) 236:1699–1711
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-018-5252-0
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Rate of recalibration to changing affordances for squeezing
through doorways reveals the role of feedback
John M. Franchak
1
· Frank A. Somoano
1
Received: 5 October 2017 / Accepted: 30 March 2018 / Published online: 5 April 2018
© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract
Recalibration of affordance perception in response to changing motor abilities can only occur if observers detect appropri-
ate perceptual information. Recent work suggests that although many affordances can be recalibrated without practicing the
specific action to gather outcome feedback—information about whether the attempted action succeeded or failed—calibra-
tion of other affordances might depend on outcome feedback (Franchak, Attent Percept Psychophys 79:1816–1829, 2017).
However, past work could not rule out the possibility that practicing the action produced perceptual–motor feedback besides
outcome feedback that facilitated recalibration. The results of two experiments support the hypothesis that recalibration
in a doorway squeezing task depends on outcome feedback as opposed to perceptual–motor feedback. After putting on a
backpack that changed participants’ doorway squeezing ability, affordance judgments were uncalibrated and remained so
even after making repeated judgments. However, after practicing the action, which produced outcome feedback, judgments
rapidly calibrated. Moreover, the order of feedback information directly impacted participants’ judgments: Participants did
not recalibrate if they received only success experience or only failure experience. Recalibration only occurred after partici-
pants received both types of feedback experiences, suggesting that outcome feedback is necessary for recalibration in the
doorway squeezing task. More generally, the results of the current study support a key tenet of ecological psychology—that
affordance perception depends on action-specific information about body–environment relations.
Keywords Affordances · Recalibration · Exploration · Feedback · Perception and action
Introduction
According to the ecological approach to perception (Gibson
1979), perceiving whether actions are possible—that is, per-
ceiving affordances—means detecting information about the
fit between the actor’s body and the environment (Mark et al.
1990; Warren and Whang 1987). Perceptual information for
affordances is thus action-referential (Thomas et al. 2016),
and different affordances (i.e., possibilities for different types
of actions) are perceived via different informational vari-
ables. In contrast, according to computational approaches
to perception (e.g., Kording and Wolpert 2006; Marr 1982),
observers detect metric properties about the environment
that are general-purpose, and thus action-neutral. Decisions
about action possibilities are based on a comparison between
body representations and representations of environmental
properties. From a computational perspective, a single per-
cept of an environmental property can be used broadly for
decisions about any actions that involve that property. For
example, metric doorway width could be used to judge pos-
sibilities for a variety of different actions: walking straight
through the doorway (walking task) versus squeezing
through the doorway in a sideways position (squeezing task).
However, from the ecological perspective, different
informational variables would be needed perceive those
affordances if each affordance entails a different body–envi-
ronment relation. For example, eye-height scaled visual
information relating shoulder width to doorway width allows
observers to detect affordances in the walking task (Warren
and Whang 1987). But whereas affordances in the walk-
ing task depend on shoulder width relative to doorway
The authors thank Eli Labinger and Jenna Monson for providing
feedback on earlier drafts of the manuscript and are grateful to
the members of the UCR Perception, Action, and Development
Laboratory for their help in collecting experimental data.
* John M. Franchak
franchak@ucr.edu
1
University of California, Riverside, 900 University Avenue,
Riverside, CA 92521, USA
@Phil_Robichaud
@deepthiw
@JoseServera