Perceptual-motor skills in cycling: towards an affordance-based control approach

Research in experimental psychology has contributed to the understanding of safe and effective transport. Analysing the perceptual-motor skills that support safely riding a vehicle and navigating the traffic environment has practical implications for improving educational programs, transport policies, and infrastructure and vehicle design. First, our critical review presents the state of art on experimental studies examining perceptual-motor skills in cycling. Experimental studies have often used cycling simulators or virtual reality lab settings leading to circumstances where perception and cognition are measured independent of action. Other experimental studies have examined perceptual-motor skills for controlling a vehicle but rarely used in-situ settings that sample real traffic contexts. Last, experimental studies have often investigated how individuals perform and behave to achieve the task-goal without considering the individual constraints, notably dynamic perception of body size and the action capabilities of the participants. Instead, we argue that current research would benefit from viewing cycling as a person-plus-object system, emphasising the mutual and reciprocal couplings between the individual, the vehicle and the environment. Anchored in ecological psychology, our review explores how an affordance-based control approach brings a novel perspective to study cycling by addressing how individuals attune to relevant information for action, grounded in and scaled to their action capabilities, and perceiving the opportunities for action offered by the environment (defined as “affordances”) to navigate dynamic traffic safely and effectively.