Perceiving the Affordances of Others

Humans have the ability to perceive the action opportunities available to others. Research has shown that we are adept at picking up affordances for ourselves, but can we do the same for others? Two competing views on this matter are the mental simulation approach and the ecological view. The mental simulation approach suggests that we perceive the affordances of others by mentally simulating how we would perform the same action ourselves, while the ecological view proposes that we directly pick up information from the environment to determine the action capacities of others. A study by Raman Zoni et al. compared these approaches and found that participants were accurate in judging the maximum reach height for another person, even when the person's action capabilities were very different. This supports the idea that information about others' actions is specified in the optic array, providing evidence for direct perception of affordances rather than mental simulation.