The Affordance Of Graspable Feature: The Orientation Effect

In the fifties and sixties of last century,with the success of Behaviorism revolution, cognitive psychology of which the reseach focus lies in psychological process returns to the embrace of psychology.As a result,the first-generation cognitive science based on computer metaphor and functionism became the mainstream of cognitive psychology.Even though the traditional cognitive psychology functions popular mainstream in cognitive science,the second-generation cognitive science is also rising quietly.The second-generation cognitive science emphasizes the embodiment of cognitive and abandons computer metaphor,for which reason it is also known as embodied cognition.The ecological view of perception of Gibson,a famous ecological psychologist and also a perceptal psychologist,is recognized to be the pilot of embodied cognition.He thought that the visual information provided by environment was enough for an individual to behave and interacte with his sorroundings and therefore internal processes and representation are not necessary.The affordance is the core concept of ecological psychology and perceptual psychology, but there isn't a specific theoretical definition for it because of its rich and far-reaching meaning though most theorists consider the possibility,the possibility of behavior provided by environment,as its essence.The orientation of day-to-day appliances(especially tools) is an important source of affordance,which is shown as orientation effect.The orientation effect was first found in 1998 and aroused immediate and growing general interest of researchers.Taking college students as subjects,the influence of experience in daily life and grasp -albe features of tools on orientation effect as well as the role that attention plays and the time course of this effect are studied in this paper.First of all,stimulus materials for formal experiment are selected through evaluation,which are divided into four groups such as familiar or not,with clear graspable feature or not.The experimental results are as follows:(1) Tools with graspable feature still gives rise to orientation effect in the control of attention,indicating that orientation effect can be completely explained by affordance hypothesis and exclude the interpretation of attention-directing hypothesis.(2) Familiarity with the tools itself is not a decisive factor on orientation effect.Graspable feature will automatically activate the corresponding action inspite of the tool's familiarity.(3) Orientation effect always appear for different SOA and doesn't change with different SOA conditions.