Research & Education of Psychology

The slides and texts below were presented at the 4th  ISCAR Congress (1 October, 2014,  Sydney, Australia).

 

The objective of this presentation is to view socio-cultural events and actions from a perspective of ecological psychology. Three theses will be mentioned; 1) Socio-cultural events are perceived directly as are events in natural worlds; 2) When we grasp socio-cultural meanings of objects, the objects afford us some socio-cultural actions; 3) We can only copy actions of the socio-culturally adept when we start to participate in some culture as socio-culturally immature members. Then, we are gradually developing our actions by regulating them to the exterospecific/propriospecific informations derived from the socio-cultural adept. As our actions are developing to be socio-cultural, so are developing our perception to our actions. The both are developing each other circularly. I attempt to confirm these theses by showing three cases. The first evidence is the development of Japanese pro-wrestling fans’ actions in their culture, in which it is suggested that the development of the socio-culturally immature’s actions is going along with that of their perception to their own actions. Another example is ‘postboxes’. Postboxes afford ‘delivering something to someone’. But culturally immature people like young children, they may afford ‘putting something into them’. The culturally immature are developing their actions and perception to postboxes through the similar process in the first example. The final example is a kid’s toy whose name is “as kids like to do”. This is made to prevent kids from playing with furnishings such as telephones, paper tissue, etc. by switching their attention. This successes in preventing infants, but often comes to fail when kids grow up. This suggests that kids’ actions to objects are developing from mere bodily movements to socio-cultural actions. “As kids like to do” affords physical movements but not socio-cultural actions. The makers’ and users’ failure originates from the confusion between the two kinds of affordances.    (read more)