Affordance

An affordance is an opportunity for action that an environment offers an organism. It depends on the relation between environmental features and the organism’s abilities.

James J. Gibson: An American psychologist who developed ecological psychology and made affordances central to his account of perception. He defined affordances as possibilities for action offered by the environment to an animal.
Ecological niche: The set of environmental conditions and resources that support a species or organism. An organism encounters affordances within the structured surroundings that make up its niche.
Human–computer interaction: The study and design of interactions between people and computing systems. Interface designers use affordance concepts to explain how visual elements suggest or enable actions.
Affordance (design): A design concept concerning action possibilities that users perceive in objects or interfaces. Design usage often emphasizes perceived possibilities, unlike Gibson’s emphasis on organism–environment relations.
Ecological psychology: An approach to psychology that studies perception and action as relations between organisms and their environments. Affordances are a central concept in its account of how organisms perceive usable surroundings.
Sensorimotor contingency: A lawful relation between sensory changes and the movements that produce them. Learning how movement changes sensory input helps reveal which actions the surroundings permit.
Donald Norman: An American cognitive scientist and design theorist known for work on usability and human-centered design. His design writing popularized affordances while distinguishing them from cues that merely suggest actions.
Perceived affordance: An action possibility that an agent believes an object or environment offers. A perceived possibility can diverge from the action the environment actually permits.
Perception–action cycle: A recurring process in which perception guides action and action changes the information available for perception. An organism often discovers an affordance by moving and detecting how the environment responds.
Direct perception: The view that perception can pick up information in the environment without inference from impoverished sensations. Gibson’s account treats affordances as available in environmental information rather than constructed from detached cues.

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