Have you ever come to a door and assumed it opens by pushing or pulling? If there is no sign or image telling you how the door works, you either experiment with ‘trial and error’, make a mistake and try the alternative. (I’ve been part of social psychology experiments where doors are glued shut, to observe what people do and, how long they persist in trying to open a shut door.)

We also see in some places, signs telling us what to do, to try and save harm. The silent part of a sign that states ‘this door opens outwards’ is that ‘Safety has been here’.

We all know this experience, because we all have assumptions about how doors work. We learn at a very young age how a door works – by pulling, pushing or sliding. Indeed, these gestures become metaphors in language understanding we use for other things eg. ‘don’t push me’, ‘pull over’, ‘slide right in’. All learned gestures become metaphors.

The action we have learned about how things work is called its ‘affordance’.

If you want to know more about enactive thinking, affordance and risk, you can register for the free online workshops run on 8, 15, 22, 29 September 9am Canberra time with Prof. Rob Long, register here: admin@spor.com.au

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Learning how things work as a child is one of the unconscious things, we ‘absorb’ in learning and this is called learning the object’s ‘affordance’. For example, learning how to hold a cup, tip it and drink from it is a developing skill for young children. Some parents even start this process by using a ‘sippy cup’.

People and parents who know about child development know that learning is not as Kahneman suggests. Learning is not ‘fast and slow’ but rather gradual and developmental. The transition from: breast to bottle, to ‘sippy cup’ and normal cup can takes months and months of skill development. Over this period of time the child learns the affordance of each object by doing and experiencing. This is called enactivism.

There are close correlations between developmental learning, enactive experience and affordance.

Learning to open a door is like learning to sit in a chair independently. Parents know that teaching children how to sit and sit in a chair takes time. Often children start with a chair with restraints.

Then later, over time, learn to sit without restraint.

This is how all developmental learning occurs and how all affordances are learned.

Children absorb and learn unconsciously, thousands of affordances throughout their childhood.

Affordances are not learned in the brain but felt in the body. We see an object and we know how to use our body to it. And, we do it without thinking. This is called ‘automaticity’.

All affordances are learned developmentally until they become a habit, heuristic and automatic.

We also learn affordances as adults particularly if we are being inducted into how something works. Then over time the activity becomes a habit, heuristic and automatic.

When we do things in automatic, like driving a car, in SPoR, we say you are thinking in Mind three. We use the following graphic to explain the speeds of decision making and we even use the image of the brain as a compromise to help people understand the concept of slow, developmental and automatic decision making.

As part of developmental learning in SPoR, once this semiotic has been learned we then progress on to a better image of how we make decisions with our whole body. This also better explains the way we enact decisions.

In this way we explain in SPoR, that we have three centres of decision making: our head, heart and gut. Scientists call the heart and gut the second and third brain (https://spinalresearch.com.au/three-brains-head-heart-gut-sometimes-conflict/; https://www.optimumhealth.ca/blogs/health-wellness/your-3-brains-how-your-gut-heart-and-head-all-work-together-by-3-brains?srsltid=AfmBOor002JUSl7BwaFjb_32Qrq5dQ_de6oLQJyBpYqAybpokSz7Euxs).

The following is from is from a google search.

If you want to know more about enactive thinking, affordance and risk, you can register for the free online workshops run on 8, 15, 22, 29 September 9am Canberra time with Prof. Rob Long, register here: admin@spor.com.au