Designing stepping-stones landscapes: a 2D perspective does not lead to more standardization than an in-situ perspective.

Previous research found that when participants across the lifespan could be the architect of their own stepping-stones landscapes, they create nonstandardized configurations with gap-width variation. Yet, architects often use standardized dimensions in their designs for playgrounds and outdoor fitness areas. To scrutinize why architects tend to seek for more standardized designs than the examined target users, we tested the hypothesis that the difference is caused by a different perspective during the making process. After all, landscape architects generally design on 2D maps, while the participants designed in situ. We asked 67 participants to design a stepping-stones landscape on a 2D map and 67 other participants to create the landscape in situ. Contrary to our expectations, we found no indications that designing on a 2D map leads to more standardized configurations. We end with discussing other characteristics of the design processes that could potentially explain the omnipresent standardization in design.

Productive pluralism: The coming of age of ecological psychology.

The ecological approach to psychology has been a main antecedent of embodied and situated approaches to cognition. The concept of affordances in particular has gained currency throughout psychological science. Yet, contemporary ecological psychology has seemed inaccessible to outsiders and protective of its legacy. Indeed, some prominent ecological psychologists have presented their approach as a "package deal"-a principled and unified perspective on perception and action. Looking at the history of the field, however, we argue that ecological psychology has developed in rich and pluriform ways. Aiming to open the field to critical engagement and productive exchange, we identify three major strands of thought within ecological psychology, each of which emerged in the 20 years after Gibson's death: physical, biological, and social ecological psychology. Each of these strands develop ecological ideas in quite different directions, making different use of some of its central concepts, adopting different explanatory principles, and embodying different philosophical worldviews. Proponents of the ecological approach have been arguing for pluralism within cognitive science to make room for ecological psychology. Given the diversity of the strands, we extend this plea to within ecological psychology itself; the field is better off aiming for a productive pluralism in which the different strands are in dialogue with each other. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Perception of maximum distance jumpable remains accurate after an intense physical exercise and during recovery.

Earlier studies have revealed that changes in action capabilities due to fatigue or wearing a backpack have an effect on the perception of distance in meters or steepness in angles. Although these findings are interesting by themselves, they leave us uninformed about whether the accuracy of affordance perception is affected by fatigue. Are people still capable of accurately perceiving the maximum distance jumpable after an intense physical exercise? In the present experiment, this question is addressed. We found that after maximal exertion in a squatting task, the actual maximum jumping distance significantly decreased, but recovered quickly. Interestingly, on average, the participants accurately perceived their maximum jumping distance both before and after the squatting task. Apparently, the accuracy of the affordance perception remains intact after an intense physical exercise. The implications of this finding are discussed.

Crossing the Gap: Older Adults Do Not Create Less Challenging Stepping Stone Configurations Than Young Adults.

BACKGROUND: Despite the known health benefits of physical activity, the number of older adults exercising regularly remains low in many countries. There is a demand for public open space interventions that can safely train balance, muscular strength, and cardiovascular fitness. In this participatory design study, older adults and young adults were to create their own stepping stones configurations. We provided them with six stepping stones, and examined the gap widths that each group of participants created and how they used the configurations. RESULTS: The created absolute gap distances by the older adults were smaller than those of the younger adults. Yet, the amount of challenge (in terms of the created gap widths relative to a person's estimated stepping capability) did not significantly differ between the young and older adults. Furthermore, both groups created non-standardized stepping stone configurations in which the number of different gap widths did not significantly differ between the young and older adults. Interestingly, while using their personalized design, older adults made significantly more gap crossings than younger adults over a given timespan. This finding tentatively suggests that personalized design invites physical activity in older adults. CONCLUSION: The present study demonstrated that older adults are not more conservative in designing their own stepping stone configuration than young adults. Especially in light of the public health concern to increase physical activity in seniors, this is a promising outcome. However, field tests are needed to establish whether the older adults' stepping stones designs also invite physical activity in their daily environment.

On the Education About/of Radical Embodied Cognition.

In mainstream or strong university education, the teacher selects and transmits knowledge and skills that students are to acquire and reproduce. Many researchers of radical embodied cognitive science still adhere to this way of teaching, even though this prescriptive pedagogy deeply contrasts with the theoretical underpinnings of their science. In this paper, we search for alternative ways of teaching that are more aligned with the central non-prescriptive and non-representational tenets of radical embodied cognitive science. To this end, we discuss recent views on education by Tim Ingold and Gert Biesta, which are based on Dewey's philosophy of pragmatism and Gibsons' ecological approach. The paper starts by introducing radical embodied cognitive science, particularly as it relates to motor skill learning, one of our prime interests in research and teaching. Next, we provide a synopsis and critique of the still dominant prescriptive and explicating pedagogy of strong education. Following Ingold and Biesta, we search for a weak alternative through a careful consideration of the education of attention and the participating teacher. To illustrate our arguments, we use examples of the first author's teaching about/of motor skill learning. The paper is concluded by briefly considering the implications of weak education for a radical embodied science of motor skill learning.

Suboptimalities for sure: Arguments from evolutionary theory.

Rahnev & Denison (R&D) addressed the issue of (sub)optimalities in perception but only made a passing reference to evolutionary thinking. In our commentary, we concur with the authors' claim that evolution does not work toward optimalities, but argue that an evolutionary perspective on perception questions the Bayesian approach that the authors adopted.

RAAAF's office landscape The End of Sitting: Energy expenditure and temporary comfort when working in non-sitting postures.

An earlier study suggested that the activity-inviting office landscape called "The End of Sitting", designed by Rietveld Architecture Art Affordances (RAAAF), should be considered as an alternative working environment to prevent sedentary behavior. The End of Sitting lacks chairs and tables but consists instead of a myriad of sloped surfaces at different heights that afford workers to stand, lean or recline at different locations. In this study, we assessed the impact of four of its workspaces on physical intensity, temporary comfort and productivity of office work and compared the outcomes with sitting and standing behind a desk. Twenty-four participants worked for 10 minutes in each of the six test conditions. Energy expenditure, measured by indirect calorimetry, and heart rate were recorded. Questionnaires were used to assess the perceived comfort. The number of words found in the word search test was counted as a measure of productivity. The majority of The End of Sitting workspaces led to a significant increase in energy expenditure compared with sitting behind a desk (ps < .05). Average MET values ranged from 1.40 to 1.58 which is a modest rise in energy expenditure compared to sitting (1.32 METs) and not significantly different from standing (1.47 METs). The scores on the general comfort scale indicated that some workspaces were less comfortable than sitting (ps < .05), but the vast majority of participants reported that at least one of The End of Sitting workspaces was equally or more comfortable than sitting. No differences in productivity between the test conditions were found. Further long-term studies are required to assess the behavioral adaptations, productivity and the level of comfort when using The End of Sitting as a permanent office.

Affordances and neuroscience: Steps towards a successful marriage.

The concept of affordance is rapidly gaining popularity in neuroscientific accounts of perception and action. This concept was introduced by James Gibson to refer to the action possibilities of the environment. By contrast, standard cognitive neuroscience typically uses the concept to refer to (action-oriented) representations in the brain. This paper will show that the view of affordances as representations firmly places the concept in the subject-object framework that dominates both psychology and neuroscience. Notably, Gibson introduced the affordance concept to overcome this very framework. We describe an account of the role of the brain in perception and action that is consistent with Gibson. Making use of neuroscientific findings of neural reuse, degeneracy and functional connectivity, we conceptualize neural regions in the brain as dispositional parts of perceptual and action systems that temporarily assemble to enable animals to directly perceive and - in the paradigmatic case - utilize the affordances of the environment.

Aldo van Eyck's Playgrounds: Aesthetics, Affordances, and Creativity.

After World War II, the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck developed hundreds of playgrounds in the city of Amsterdam. These public playgrounds were located in parks, squares, and derelict sites, and consisted of minimalistic aesthetic play equipment that was supposed to stimulate the creativity of children. Over the last decades, these playgrounds have been studied by sociologists, theorists of art and architecture, and psychologists. Adopting an ecological approach to the human environment, it is argued that the abstract forms of van Eyck's play sculptures indeed stimulate the creativity of the child. Whereas a slide or a swing almost dictates what a child is supposed to do, van Eyck's play equipment invites the child to actively explore the numerous affordances (action possibilities) it provided. However, it is argued that the standardization (e.g., equal distances between blocks or bars) that tends to characterize van Eyck' play equipment has negative effects on the playability. This standardization, which was arguably the result of the aesthetic motives of the designer, might be appealing to children when simply looking at the equipment, but it is not of overriding importance to them when playing in it. Indeed, a recent study indicates that the affordances provided by messy structures appear to have a greater appeal to playing children.

Gap-crossing behavior in a standardized and a nonstandardized jumping stone configuration.

Over the last years, the omnipresent standardization of playgrounds-the distances between, for example, jumping stones tend to be equal-has been criticized by both scientists and architects. First, it has been argued that standardization fails to do justice to the variability in the children's action capabilities. Second, it might simplify play in that children repetitively cross over the same distance and, thus, do not have to worry about their movements anymore. In the present study we examined the gap-crossing behavior of children in both a standardized and a nonstandardized jumping stone configuration. Children, between 5 and 10 years of age, were to play in each configuration for two minutes. No significant differences between the configurations were found in the number of gaps the children crossed and the percentage of jumps (ps>0.05). However, more children crossed a gap that they perceived as challenging (i.e. gap width close to their estimated maximum jumping distance) in the nonstandardized configuration than in the standardized one. Interestingly, significant differences were found in variables reflecting the children's action preparation-the variation in both the time on a jumping stone and the numbers of steps on it was bigger in the nonstandardized playground than in the standardized one (ps<0.05). The implications of these findings are discussed for both the design of playgrounds and the academic discussions about them.

'The End of Sitting': An Empirical Study on Working in an Office of the Future.

BACKGROUND: Inspired by recent findings that prolonged sitting has detrimental health effects, Rietveld Architecture Art Affordances (RAAAF) and visual artist Barbara Visser designed a working environment without chairs and desks. This environment, which they called The End of Sitting, is a sculpture whose surfaces afford working in several non-sitting postures (e.g. lying, standing, leaning). OBJECTIVE: In the present study, it was tested how people use and experience The End of Sitting. Eighteen participants were to work in this environment and in a conventional office with chairs and desks, and the participants' activities, postures, and locations in each working environment were monitored. In addition, participants' experiences with working in the offices were measured with a questionnaire. RESULTS: It was found that 83 % of participants worked in more than one non-sitting posture in The End of Sitting. All these participants also changed location in this working environment. On the other hand, in the conventional office all but one participant sat on a chair at a desk during the entire work session. On average, participants reported that The End of Sitting supported their well-being more than the conventional office. Participants also felt more energetic after working in The End of Sitting. No differences between the working environments were found in reported concentration levels and satisfaction with the created product. CONCLUSION: The End of Sitting is a potential alternative working environment that deserves to be examined in more detail.

Transfer of attunement in length perception by dynamic touch.

Earlier studies have revealed that the calibration of an action sometimes transfers in a functionally specific way-the calibration of one action transfers to other actions that serve the same goal, even when they are performed with different anatomical structures. In the present study, we tested whether attunement (the process by which perceivers learn to detect a more useful, specifying, informational pattern) follows such a functional organization. Participants were trained to perceive the length of rods by dynamic touch with one of their effectors. It was found that training the right hand resulted in an attunement to a specifying variable with both hands, but not with the feet. Training the other limbs did not result in attunement. However, substantial individual differences were found. The implications of the results are explored for theories on the organization of perceptual learning and discussions on individual differences in perception.

Information without content: a Gibsonian reply to enactivists' worries.

In this article, we aim to strengthen the emerging radical, non-representational, approaches to cognitive science by defusing the worries radical enactivists have with the use of information in the ecological approaches - namely the worry that information carries content. We show that Gibson's later use of the concept is meant to allow for a content-less notion of information, but that the language surrounding information in ecological psychology has subsequently slipped into a more cognitivistic vocabulary. We argue that by considering ecological information not to be information about, but information for affordances, the notion of information can be fruitfully applied without invoking notions of content. Gibson's later notion of information for perception, stresses the insight that in ecological theory there is no information in content, but only in use. It is suggested that radical cognition should embrace this notion of information without content, as doing so can help to situate the enactivist's "basic mind" into large and complex scales of coordination.

Perceivers vary in their capacity to benefit from feedback in learning to perceive length by dynamic touch.

Earlier ecologically motivated studies have revealed substantial individual differences in perceptual learning: Individuals varied in their ability to attune to a specifying variable. A possible source of these individual differences is between-subjects variation in the capacity to benefit from feedback. Although this hypothesis was postulated by Withagen & van Wermeskerken (2009), their experiment could not exclude other factors that might be involved. The aim of the present experiment was to provide a more critical test of their hypothesis. To this end, we trained two groups of participants in length perception by dynamic touch in two different learning environments. In one environment, it was easier for a perceiver to separate the perceptual noise from the error that resulted from the detection of a nonspecifying variable. This separation was more difficult to make in the other learning environment. All of the participants responded to the feedback in the easy environment, but not all of them did in the difficult environment. This indicates that individuals indeed differ in their capacities to benefit from feedback. The implications of these results for recent debates on individual differences are discussed.

Cultural and learning differences in the Judd illusion.

In the present study, we examined whether individual differences in the perception of illusory Judd drawings point to variability in the pickup of informational variables. Two sources for these individual differences were addressed: culture and learning. East Asian (n = 24) and Western (n = 24) participants made perceptual judgments of the midpoint of the shaft of various Judd figures in a pretest-practice-posttest design. During practice, half of the participants received feedback about the actual midpoint after each trial, while the other half did not receive feedback. The results showed differences among perceivers of different cultures in judging the midpoints of the shafts of Judd figures, particularly with respect to their propensity to improve perceptual accuracy after repeated practice and feedback. For most participants, changes in illusory bias as a consequence of learning were shown to reflect either a change in what informational variable they exploited or a rescaling or calibration of the perception to the informational variable. However, the individual differences in illusory bias related to culture could not be unequivocally attributed to either of these perceptual-learning processes.

Aging affects attunement in perceiving length by dynamic touch.

Earlier studies have revealed age-dependent differences in perception by dynamic touch. In the present study, we examined whether the capacity to learn deteriorates with aging. Adopting an ecological approach to learning, the authors examined the process of attunement--that is, the changes in what informational variable is exploited. Young and elderly adults were trained to perceive the lengths of unseen, handheld rods. It was found that the capacity to attune declines with aging: Contrary to the young adults, the elderly proved unsuccessful in learning to detect the specifying informational variables. The fact that aging affects the capacity to attune sets a new line of research in the study of perception and perceptual-motor skills of elderly. The authors discuss the implications of their findings for the ongoing discussions on the ecological approach to learning.

Towards a new ecological conception of perceptual information: lessons from a developmental systems perspective.

Over the last decades or so, empirical studies of perception, action, learning, and development have revealed that participants vary in what variable they detect and often rely on nonspecifying variables. This casts doubt on the Gibsonian conception of information as specification. It is argued that a recent ecological conception of information has solved important problems, but insufficiently explains what determines the object of perception. Drawing on recent work on developmental systems, we sketch the outlines of an alternative conception of perceptual information. It is argued that perceptual information does not reside in the ambient arrays; rather, perceptual information is a relational property of patterns in the array and perceptual processes. What a pattern in the ambient flow informs about depends on the perceiver who uses it. We explore the implications of this alternative conception of information for the ecological approach to perception and action.

How mechanical context and feedback jointly determine the use of mechanical variables in length perception by dynamic touch.

Earlier studies have revealed that both mechanical context and feedback determine what mechanical invariant is used to perceive length by dynamic touch. In the present article, the authors examined how these two factors jointly constrain the informational variable that is relied upon. Participants were to judge length while wielding a rod or while holding it stationary. In two experiments, it was tested whether perceptual learning effects in the wielding condition transferred to the holding condition and vice versa. There was an asymmetry in transfer across mechanical conditions: Improvements in the holding context transferred to the wielding condition, but not vice versa. Examining the individuals' exploitation of mechanical variables, we found that, after feedback, participants changed in information usage in both mechanical conditions. For many participants, these changes were not confined to the mechanical context in which the feedback was provided. Indeed, feedback in one mechanical context brought about changes in information usage that often manifested themselves in the other mechanical condition. The authors explore the implications of these findings for research on perceptual learning in dynamic touch and the salience hypothesis.

Individual differences in learning to perceive length by dynamic touch: evidence for variation in perceptual learning capacities.

Recent studies of perceptual learning have explored and commented on variation in learning trajectories. Although several factors have been suggested to account for this variation, thus far the idea that humans vary in their perceptual learning capacities has received scant attention. In the present experiment, we aimed at providing a detailed picture of the variation in this capacity by investigating the perceptual learning trajectories of a considerable number of participants. The learning process was studied using the paradigm of length perception by dynamic touch. The results showed that there are substantial individual differences in the way perceivers respond to feedback. Indeed, after feedback, the participants' perceptual performances diverged. We conclude that humans vary in their perceptual learning capacities. The implications of this finding for recent discussions on variation in perception are explored.

The role of feedback information for calibration and attunement in perceiving length by dynamic touch.

Two processes have been hypothesized to underlie improvement in perception: attunement and calibration. These processes were examined in a dynamic touch paradigm in which participants were asked to report the lengths of unseen, wielded rods differing in length, diameter, and material. Two experiments addressed whether feedback informs about the need for reattunement and recalibration. Feedback indicating actual length induced both recalibration and reattunement. Recalibration did not occur when feedback indicated only whether 2 rods were of the same length or of different lengths. Such feedback, however, did induce reattunement. These results suggest that attunement and calibration are dissociable processes and that feedback informs which is needed. The observed change in variable use has implications also for research on what mechanical variables underlie length perception by dynamic touch.