Using hypersets as an analytic tool, we compare traditionally Gibsonian (Chemero 2003; Turvey 1992) and representationalist (Sahin et al. this issue) understandings of the notion ‘affordance’. We show that representationalist understandings are incompatible with direct perception and erect barriers between animal and environment. They are, therefore, scarcely recognizable as understandings of ‘...

Today’s mobile artificial agents, such as mobile robots, are based on an object-oriented paradigm. They partition their environment into various objects and act in relation to individual properties of these objects. Such perception and acting is insufficient for goal-directed behavior in dynamic environments, which requires action-relevant information in the form of affordances. Affordances des...

Planning algorithms for non-deterministic domains are often intractable in large state spaces due to the well-known “curse of dimensionality.” Existing approaches to address this problem fail to prevent the planner from considering many actions which would be obviously irrelevant to a human solving the same problem. We formalize the notion of affordances [7] as knowledge added to an MDP that pr...

The concept of affordance is popular in the HCI community but not well understood. Donald Norman appropriated the concept of affordances from James J. Gibson for the design of common objects and both implicitly and explicitly adjusted the meaning given by Gibson. There was, however, ambiguity in Norman’s original definition and use of affordances which he has subsequently made efforts to clarif...

In this paper, we set out to develop a theoretical and conceptual framework for the new field of Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience. This framework should be able to integrate insights from several relevant disciplines: theory on embodied cognition, ecological psychology, phenomenology, dynamical systems theory, and neurodynamics. We suggest that the main task of Radical Embodied Cognitive...

IT affordances have gained much attention in theoretically interpreting social media-associated behavior in information systems literature and played a crucial role in conceptually realizing IT-implicated mechanisms of human-computer interaction. But these efforts have been practically impeded in empirical research due to the lack of a validated scale. Here we address a context-specific concept...

This paper describes the development of CATS or Cognitive Affordances of Technologies Scale, a tool that can aid faculty, instructional designers, and e-learning specialists in identifying and leveraging the cognitive affordances of a learning technology. CATS includes seven multi-disciplinary research supported categories of cognitive affordances that can be harnessed to enrich student learnin...

I defend a model of the musically extended mind. I consider how acts of "musicking" grant access to novel emotional experiences otherwise inaccessible. First, I discuss the idea of "musical affordances" and specify both what musical affordances are and how they invite different forms of entrainment. Next, I argue that musical affordances - via soliciting different forms of entrainment - enhance...

Humans demonstrate remarkable capabilities to use a variety of grasp strategies for a given object depending on the context of the task often referred to as grasp affordances in dexterous hands. The interplay among the nervous system, the morphology of the human hand, and the properties of the object to demonstrate these advanced grasp affordance skills are not well understood yet. A key hypoth...

This paper presents an incremental learning mechanism to create associations between the affordances provided by the environment and its gist. The proposed model aims at helping the agent on the prioritisation of its perceptual resources, and consequently on visual attention. The focus on affordances, rather than on objects, enables a self-supervised learning mechanism without assuming the exis...