scholarly journals Do Children Have the Same Capacity to Perceive Affordances as Adults? An Investigation of Tool Selection and Use

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara M. Scharoun ◽  
Pamela J. Bryden ◽  
Michael E. Cinelli ◽  
David A. Gonzalez ◽  
Eric A. Roy

This study investigated whether 5- to 11-year-old children perceive affordances in the same way as adults (Mage = 22.93, SD = 2.16) when presented with a task and four tools (nail in a block of wood and a hammer, rock, wrench, and comb; bucket of sand and a shovel, wooden block, rake, and tweezers; and a screw in a block of wood and a screwdriver, knife, dime, and crayon). Participants were asked to select the best tool and act on an object until all four assigned tools had been selected. No explicit instructions were provided because we were interested in how task perception would influence tool selection and action. Results support the notion that the capacity to perceive affordances increases with age. Furthermore, differences in the way in which 5-year-olds acted on the screw in a block of wood demonstrated that the ability to detect some affordances takes longer to refine. Findings help to further the understanding of the development of perception-action coupling.

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Warren Young ◽  
Russell Rayner ◽  
Scott Talpey

AbstractAgility is an important skill for both attackers and defenders in invasion sports such as codes of football. On the sporting field, agility requires reacting to a stimulus, often presented by an opponent’s movement, before a change of direction or speed. There is a plethora of research that examines the movement component of agility in isolation, which is described as change-of-direction (COD) ability, and this is thought to underpin agility performance. This opinion article proposes that COD ability should not be researched as the only or primary outcome measure when the objective is to inform agility performance in invasion sports. It is argued that pre-planned COD movements and tests lack ecological validity because they lack perception-action coupling and involve movement out of context from the game. The movement techniques and strength qualities required for the performance of COD tests can be quite different to those required for agility. It is suggested that COD tests can be applied to sports that involve pre-planned COD movements, but researchers should endeavour to use agility tests when studying invasion sports. Some new methods for assessing one-on-one agility contests are reported as potentially valuable for future research, and examples of research questions are provided.


2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 451-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geert J.P. Savelsbergh ◽  
John van der Kamp ◽  
Walter E. Davis

Twenty-one children with Down syndrome (DS) and 20 without disability, ages 3 to 11 years, completed the experiment in which they were asked to grasp and lift cardboard cubes of different sizes (2.2 to 16.2 cm in width). Three conditions were used: (a) increasing the size from the smallest to the largest cube, (b) decreasing the size from the largest to the smallest, and (c) a random order of sizes. Children with DS were found to have smaller hand sizes in comparison to age-matched children without DS. In addition, the shift from one-handed to two-handed grasping appeared at a smaller cube size for children with DS than for children without DS. However, when the dimensionless ratio between object size and hand size was considered, the differences between groups disappeared, indicating that the differences in grasping patterns between children with and without DS can be attributed to differences in body size.


2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 43-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Vignais ◽  
Benoit Bideau ◽  
Cathy Craig ◽  
Sébastien Brault ◽  
Franck Multon ◽  
...  

In sports science, the link between the experimental protocol and the subject's behaviour in real condition is a key issue. Virtual reality enables to examine this topic because of the reproducibility of situations and the total control of animated humanoids in situations similar to the real world. This study aimed to analyze the influence of the degree of perception-action coupling on the performance of handball goalkeepers in a virtual environment. 8 national handball goalkeepers were asked to react to the actions of a virtual handball thrower in two conditions: a perception-action uncoupled condition (defined as a judgment task) and a perception-action coupled condition (defined as a motor task). In the judgment condition, goalkeepers were asked to make a perceptual judgment with their hand in their own time after the virtual throw; in the motor task condition, goalkeepers had to react in real-time to the virtual throwing motion. Results showed that percentage of successful response was higher in the motor task condition and radial error (distance between the ball and the closest limb when trial was unsuccessful) was lower for the same condition. Implications of our findings are discussed, as well as suggestions for further research..


Author(s):  
Naama Rotem-Kohavi ◽  
Courtney G. E. Hilderman ◽  
Aiping Liu ◽  
Nadia Makan ◽  
Jane Z. Wang ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (s1) ◽  
pp. S63-S75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moeko Ueno ◽  
Ichiro Uchiyama ◽  
Joseph J. Campos ◽  
David I. Anderson ◽  
Minxuan He ◽  
...  

Infants show a dramatic shift in postural and emotional responsiveness to peripheral lamellar optic flow (PLOF) following crawling onset. The present study used a novel virtual moving room to assess postural compensation of the shoulders backward and upward and heart rate acceleration to PLOF specifying a sudden horizontal forward translation and a sudden descent down a steep slope in an infinitely long virtual tunnel. No motion control conditions were also included. Participants were 53 8.5-month-old infants: 25 prelocomotors and 28 hands-and-knees crawlers. The primary findings were that crawling infants showed directionally appropriate postural compensation in the two tunnel motion conditions, whereas prelocomotor infants were minimally responsive in both conditions. Similarly, prelocomotor infants showed nonsignificant changes in heart rate acceleration in the tunnel motion conditions, whereas crawling infants showed significantly higher heart rate acceleration in the descent condition than in the descent control condition, and in the descent condition than in the horizontal translation condition. These findings highlight the important role played by locomotor experience in the development of the visual control of posture and in emotional reactions to a sudden optically specified drop. The virtual moving room is a promising paradigm for exploring the development of perception–action coupling.


2013 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars Muckli ◽  
Lucy S. Petro ◽  
Fraser W. Smith

AbstractClark offers a powerful description of the brain as a prediction machine, which offers progress on two distinct levels. First, on an abstract conceptual level, it provides a unifying framework for perception, action, and cognition (including subdivisions such as attention, expectation, and imagination). Second, hierarchical prediction offers progress on a concrete descriptive level for testing and constraining conceptual elements and mechanisms of predictive coding models (estimation of predictions, prediction errors, and internal models).


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