Affordance-based control (Fajen 2005, 2007)

The most commonly studied tasks in the ecological approach involve the perceptual control of actions such as interception and steering. These models all involve perceiving some variable and moving so as to null the discrepancy between a current value and an ideal value. However, none of these approaches involve the perception of affordances; specifically, none of them address how people work to keep the required corrections possible, given their action capabilities. Fajen (2005, 2007) proposes affordance-based control, an ecological research framework that brings these questions to the fore and leads to the discovery of new, affordance based control strategies that account well for the data and solve the problems of simple information-based control models. 

My current sense is that Fajen is absolutely correct in his assessment of the problems and has done sterling work developing an ecological solution. What follows is a brief description of the problems and his solutions; in the future I will blog some thoughts as I work to align my throwing affordance work with this framework.