James J. Gibson's affordance examples

The concept of affordances, developed by James J. Gibson (1904-1979), has been widely adopted in psychology and other fields. Despite this, there remains substantial disagreement about how to understand the concept. Plausibly, the roots of this confusion lie in Gibson's texts, including his examples. I present the first systematic analysis of the examples that Gibson used when explaining the affordance concept. In all, Gibson identifies 188 distinct examples across six texts published in his lifetime and 25 short posthumously published memos. I analyze the examples in terms of their mode of operation, their valence or polarity, and their sociality. This analysis reveals that, for Gibson, the affordance concept is broader than is often presented by later commentators. Affordances are today routinely glossed as "opportunities" or "possibilities for action." Gibson did not use these phrases. A number of his examples refer not to potential actions but to other kinds of potential outcomes, including perceptual, metabolic, or cognitive outcomes. I suggest that Gibson's theory of affordances encompasses two distinguishable research objectives, which have often been conflated: a theory of the control of action and a theory of perceptual orientation to meaningful features of the environment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).