Abstract
The previous study showed that if a person identifies an object as having one function, or affordance, they will tend not to later classify it as having a different affordance. The present study shows that this decreased likelihood of identifying a second function of a multi-affordance object also appears in the perception of the affordance, as assessed by a scaling analysis of similarity judgments. The MDS analysis of similarity judgments showed objects with both affordances became worse examples of one of the affordances if their similarity, in terms of the other affordance, to other objects had been previously evaluated. It appears that the inhibition of a second action property is perceptual in nature and the degree of inhibition is sensitive to the initial similarity relations.
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