Affordances in interaction – the case of Aikido

ABSTRACT

Our title can be read as trivially true, namely that perceived affordances shape real-time interaction dynamics. A less trivial reading suggests that affordances themselves interact in a shared dyadic field, such that the number and quality of A's and B's affordances are dynamically coupled with bidirectional causality. In dance, martial arts, or team sports agents strategically comodulate each other's affordances while pursuing their aims. In Aikido, where agents try to break their opponent's balance, this trade-off globally approximates a zero-sum game – the better A's affordances, the lousier B's Affordances are subject to ceaseless cross-causation in this shared field. Practitioners seek to obstruct their opponent's options while strategically enabling, augmenting, and sculpting their own, by employing subtle perceptual manipulation skills, redirecting force, brinkmanship, and switching techniques opportunistically. To overcome static views, we conceptualize affordances as cascading and having fluid onsets; we also identify nested affordances in goal hierarchies and describe a spectrum of affordance functions. Ultimately, we suggest rethinking the ontology of affordances as being sensitive to dynamic engagements, hence defined relative to interpersonal emergence.

Disclaimer

As a service to authors and researchers we are providing this version of an accepted manuscript (AM). Copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proofs will be undertaken on this manuscript before final publication of the Version of Record (VoR). During production and pre-press, errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal relate to these versions also.

Notes

¹ Explication interviewing was used in 18 retrospective interviews with learners of 3-11 years of training and twelve think-alouds with 3rd to 6th dans, i.e. expert ranks one typically receives after 15 to 35 years of training. Explication interviewing is a phenomenological method that uses dialogical probes to arrest the informant's attention, which allows informants to zoom in on their experience (Petitmengin, 2006). The interviewer's task is to encourage a mindful state, thus making the respondent bodily aware, yet reflexive too. The specific procedure of explication sessions was to ask the practitioners to intuitively parse an interaction of perhaps 1,5 to 4 seconds, construct a timeline, and then zoom in on “thin slices” of approximately half a second for detailed inspection. The procedure is incident-based and highly specific as regards sensory triggers, know-how regarding active perceptual probing (dynamic touch, etc.), who perceived what when, how agents reciprocally trigger each other (see Fig. 1), and how perception shapes action strategies. It also allows exploring action imagery, the span of decision windows, and possible action alternatives. Furthermore, note that ethnographic data guided the process throughout, which came from C. Rogler's participant observation and Aikido practice diary kept over two years

² While it is probably a moot point whether affordances ontologically exist when not presently perceived, methodological considerations suggest great caution concerning speculative or anecdotally based existence claims. In view of context effects, skill effects, interactivity effects, and non-linear cross-catalysis between parameters in a complex interaction setting, we deem it risky to posit affordances in general. Rather we emphasize the importance of carefully reconstructing unique interaction dynamics based on “who perceives what when?” and “who decides and executes what when?

³ Interestingly, some aspects like to which side to step out of line may be rather decisionistically chosen – without manifest efficiency gradients yet – while later action preferences spring from the resulting interaction after contact

⁴ As the flipside of this, agents may also be aware of what could give the opponent a prospective affordance. Since roles are switched frequently agents are rather familiar with how the scenario appears to the opponent (allocentric perspective, Mark, 2007). This mental role reversal, as it were, help agents avoid tell-tale signals to avoid accidental enablement of their opponent

⁵ This relates to the emphasis in dynamic systems approaches on multiple timescales of interaction (Dumas, Kelso, & Nadel, 2014; Eiler, Kallen, Harrison, & Richardson, 2013). Permanent “grammar” skills are one important aspect of how the higher timescale becomes effective, although other, more interactive aspects like training history with a partner also belong in this category

⁶ Given the frequency of scripted Aikido training, this suggests affordance related expectations can become embedded into a complex event representation used to understand causal dependencies and can guide a multi-phasic action (Hommel & Nattkemper, 2011). Whilst many teachers warn against too rigid scripts and encourage throwing them overboard at some point, quite many practitioners report these scripts

⁷ We may elaborate on improvisation skills here. Two prerequisites were mentioned earlier, namely temporally fine-grained perception and a sizeable action repertoire, to which we may add further skills: (1) In unfamiliar situations highly trained perceptual faculties allow integrating meaningful information, notably affordance-specifying invariants that tell them “what's going on” and “how to continue from here”. (2) Experts also show capabilities for softly assembling novel action solutions on the spot based on a deeper biomechanical understanding of possibilities of toppling another body (e.g. one informant mentioned he uses four principles which allow subsuming all techniques he uses, but also allows him to finding hybrid solutions)

⁸ This example shows that self-organizing collective order can be created through visual information, without touching yet when both agents react in strategically lawful ways to one another (similar to chess champions who see when they need to give up several moves in advance)

⁹ On the asset side, cross-catalysis – sometimes called “enslaving” through the macro-dynamic – can boost agent's ability to jointly solve a problem or act as a team (Auvray, Lenay, & Stewart, 2009; Riley, Richardson, Shockley, & Ramenzoni, 2011). The flipside of the coin is that self-organization can generate seeming paradoxes. A familiar sensorimotor example is starting a dynamic of mirror movements with another pedestrian, although both want to pass by quickly. Or think of situations when we seem incapable of discontinuing a row although all involved parties hate it, or of dysfunctional mutual role assignments in families (Granic, Dishion, & Hollenstein, 2003). Even political conflict escalation (Vallacher, Coleman, Nowak, & Bui-Wrzosinska, 2010) and socio-historical phenomena like fascism can be an expression of self-amplifying effects between collective emotions, crystallizing concepts, and social psychological mechanisms like contagion, group alignment, and constructed stereotypes of others (Ciompi & Endert, 2011). Agents are locked in dynamics hard to escape individually.

¹⁰ Not all collective dynamics display strong emergence. Van Orden, Holden, & Turvey (2003) define a certain class of systems as establishing interaction-dominant dynamics which begin to “enslave” the intrinsic dynamics of the components

Additional information

Funding

Austrian Science Fund(P-23067)