Assessing self and other's spatial affordances in static and dynamic environments

The judgements of self-affordances and other’s affordances are essential abilities. It is not known how both types of judgements interact and develop over time. Moreover, experimental research in this area is largely absent. This is, at least partly, due to the challenges in presenting dynamic stimuli, and quantitatively measuring people’s position when they move through their spatial environment. We intend to fill this gap by developing a novel methodology based on interactive playgrounds: open spaces instrumented with cameras and projectors. This technology allows us to experiment with dynamic spatial stimuli, and to automatically measure people’s spatial behavior. Inspired by an embodied cognition approach and Gibson’s Affordance Theory (Gibson, 1979), we will conduct two experimental studies to investigate whether people will calibrate their judgements of self-affordances when shifting from a static to a dynamic stimulus area. While the first study is aimed to validate our methodology, in a second study we will systematically investigate how perceptions of other’s affordances are related and influenced by perceptions of self-affordances. We will also look at the critical boundaries that affect this perception, including gender, body length and weight. Importantly, we will assess how these perceptions develop with age by involving children, adolescents and adults.