Social Affordances and Interaction I: Introduction

Recent extensions of the affordance concept to fundamental problems in the study of social knowing and interaction were the focus of one of the symposia at the Fifth International Conference on Event Perception and Action, at Miami University, Oxford, OH in July 1989. This article traces the history of ecological social psychology and reviews recent attempts to extend the application of the concept of affordance to the topics of social knowing and social interaction. Themes arising within three domains of contemporary ecological research are examined: (a) social perception research has stressed the direct perception of what other people afford the self and the perception of what other people are afforded in their transactions with the shared environment of surfaces, objects, places, and other persons; (b) in the study of social interaction, the emphasis recently has been on the processes of the perceiving and the assembling of social coordination, and also on the functions of social interaction in the acquisition of knowledge and behavioral competence; and (c) cultural practices, such as those involved in caregiver-infant interactions, appear to play a central role in organizing the shared focus of attention and in revealing and creating affordances for action and interaction. Some of the work described in this article appears in the current and subsequent issues of Ecological Psychology.