Perceiving affordances for aperture passage in an environment-person-person system

The authors investigated the perception of affordances for aperture passage in an environment-person-person (E-P-P) system, which comprised an adult perceiver and a child as a companion. Perceivers were 8 large and 8 small female undergraduates and were companioned with 1 large and 1 small girl. The perceivers perceptually judged the minimum aperture width for the E-P-P system, and then the adult-child dyads (a pair of people) actually walked through to determine the system's actual minimum aperture width. Results demonstrated that perceivers precisely judged the action capabilities of an E-P-P system on the basis of the body-scaled information of each adult-child dyad. The findings extended the previous concept of affordances for an environment-person system to affordances for an E-P-P system.