Abstract

Contemporary research on action-perception coupling draws on Gibson's concept of affordances. The text outlines the conceptual basis of this issue, showing how the notion of affordance is embraced in the theory of perception, understood as an active search for structured information that could improve the functioning of the organism in the environment. It also mentions a philosophical parallel (Martin Heidegger's philosophy of tools) and concludes that the intuitions behind the concept of affordances have been more inspiring to cognitive scientists, neuroscientists and researchers in robotics than to psychologists studying perception.