The Emergence of Affordances Within the Context of a Mother's and an Infant's Shared History. Paper presentation at the symposium Learning Affordances in a Complex Social Environment: A Developmental Pespective,organized by Dankert Vedeler, NTNU and Patricia Zukow-Goldring, University of Southern California

While studying the development of infant intentionality, as conceived by Trevarthen, we found that the concept of affordance emerged as a central concept in the description of this development, as a complement to the concept of intention. In ”secondary intersubjectivity” of the nine month old baby, as described by Trevarthen, objects are “recognized not only for their perceptual and manipulative affordances but also as possible entities in the awareness of others”. When mother and child play with a toy on recurring occasions, they will accumulate common experiences of things they can do with the toy; that is, what it affords. This will be a background for each new occasion in which they play with the toy. Thus, the learning of affordances may have a social, as well as a historical dimension. Using a qualitative, microgenetic design, we followed mother-infant dyads longitudinally by collecting weekly video recording of the dyad from infant age 6 to10 months in which the setting was the same over sessions and contained a set of toys. By observing play with the same toy over sessions, we could chart the emergence of affordances of the toy in this context. Simple perceptual and manipulative affordances, like mouthing, pounding, or throwing, as well as others, more specific to the toy in question, are integrated into an interactional framework, where, for example, throwing on the floor receives a significance added to the simple affordance (e.g., it affords to the child an interesting reaction from the mother). This exemplifies the relational structure of affordances in a social context.