The Perception of Affordances in Soccer

Abstract

Affordances are opportunities for action that emerge from relations between properties of an animal (human or non-human) and properties of its environment (Gibson, 1979/1986; Stoffregen, 2003). An individual’s ability detect affordances can change when a person acquires a high degree of skill in a particular sport (Higuchi et al., 2011; Seifert et al., 2018). In this dissertation, I extend research into affordances in sport, asking what soccer-specific affordances exist, and how they are detected and perceived. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to the concept of affordances, explores context-specific affordances, and introduces higher- and lower-order affordances. In Chapter 2, I explore whether the type of kick (for power vs. for precision) affects youth soccer players’ perception of affordances. Furthermore, the effect of experience on the ability to perceive kicking-related affordances is explored. Some previous research has examined task-specific affordances within a sport, and other research has examined the difference in sport-specific affordance perception between skilled athletes and persons without athletic experience. This chapter adds the novel element of soccer-task-specific affordances, as well as covarying manipulations of long- and short-term experience. Chapter 3 extends the research into affordance perception in soccer, investigating the perception of higher-order interpersonal affordances for kicking that emerge in soccer. This chapter explores how these higher-order interpersonal affordances differ from their constituent lower-order affordances on both a personal level (the distance of the kick) and at the interpersonal level (whether the ball would be kicked through a gap defined by teammates or opponents). Chapter 4 directly expands on Chapter 3, investigating the influence of additional interpersonal affordances revealing game-specific context clues. In this Chapter, participants once again experienced the personal affordance of kick distance, as well as the interpersonal affordance of player role (team), though a third factor of whether they were facing away from each other (and, thus, facing away from the future path of the to-be-kicked ball), or facing toward each other (and, thus, facing toward the future path of to-be-kicked ball). Chapter 5 serves as a general discussion of the results of this research, as well as offering suggestions for future research into soccer- and sport-specific affordance research.