Negative hysteresis in affordance experiments

To perceive an affordance is to perceive what the current layout of surfaces affords with respect to one’s body size and action capabilities (Gibson, 1979). Affordance experiments have demonstrated that the shift from one mode of behavior to another exhibits the features typical of a self-organized dynamic system (Fitzpatrick et al., 1994; Richardson et al., 2007; van der Kamp et al., 1998), where stable patterns of behavior emerge from the lawful interaction between components of the animal-environment-task system.