Abstract

According to Gibson's ecological theory of perception-action, the proper objects of perception are affordances. Affordances are directly perceivable, environmental opportunities for behavior. The current study assessed affordance judgments, and the confidence ratings corresponding to those judgments, of aperture pass-through-ability based on three modes of perceiving. The modes were vision and two blindfolded conditions involving haptic perception via technological aids: A cane and the Enactive Torch (ET). The first hypothesis, that vision would provide judgments of the critical boundary most similar to the actual boundary, was not supported. The second hypothesis, that participants would perform better on pass-through-ability judgments using the ET than when using the cane, was supported. The third hypothesis, that across all three modalities participants’ ratings of confidence in the accuracy of their yes/no judgments would be lowest near the perceptual category boundary, was supported. Results suggest that in terms of making affordance judgments of aperture pass-through-ability, participants were more accurate with the haptic modalities than with vision. Results also suggest that participants were least confident with their more accurate modality, and most confident with their least accurate modality.