Affordances of Children's Environments

A Functional Approach to Environmental Description

Abstract

This paper presents a functional approach to describing the psychological resources of children's outdoor environments. The proposed approach is based on Gibson's concept of affordances, which refers to the functional significance of environmental features for an individual. A review of several studies of children's outdoor activities from this affordance perspective reveals a set of functional properties of children's environments. The resulting functional taxonomy offers a way of thinking about children's environmentshat may be more psychologically meaningful than the standard form-based classification of environmental features.