27 November 2026 – Haeran Jeong (Turku and Düsseldorf) – “Perceiving Time as Affording Action”
Aula “Martinetti”, Via Festa del Perdono 7, h. 13:00
Abstract. Acting at the right time is crucial for everyday life and sports activities, such as steering a bicycle to avoid a collision with a pedestrian or catching a fly ball. These phenomena are well known and widely studied in the psychology. Given such examples, we seem to perceive the right time for action, which can be conceived as a temporal affordance, drawing on the ecological-psychological theory of affordance. Indeed, it is often assumed that our sense of time is closely linked to our ability to act, yet this link is rarely explicated. I address this issue by asking what it is to perceive time as affording action, i.e., as an affordance. For this purpose, I first explicate what constitute affordances in general and what it is to perceive affordances instead of cognising them, contrasting between graspability and edibility. Affordance perception will also be differentiated from action-general object perception by emphasising its involvement in action execution. Based on this, I reformulate Gibson’s event affordances into temporal affordances and explicate what it is to perceive time as affording action, i.e., temporal affordances, distinguishing it from cognising time for action planning.