The term “affordance” denotes the behavioral meaning of objects. We propose a cognitive architecture for the detection of affordances in the visual modality. This model is based on the internal simulation of movement sequences. For each movement step, the resulting sensory state is predicted by a forward model, which in turn triggers the generation of a new (simulated) motor command by an inver...

When grasping an object, a robot must identify the available forms of interaction with that object. Each of these forms of interaction, a grasp affordance, describes one canonical option for placing the hand and fingers with respect to the object as an agent prepares to grasp it. The affordance does not represent a single hand posture, but an entire manifold within a space that describes hand p...

Design knowledge reuse is widely accepted as an effective strategy for designers to develop robust artifacts with less time and lower cost. However, there has been very little research on how to help designers capture detailed design knowledge for reuse. As a result, most detailed design knowledge still has to remain in designers’ memories as tacit knowledge, which can easily get lost due to ob...

The Information systems (IS) literature explains how specific digital characteristics enable structural generativity, i.e. “a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through contributions from broad and varied audiences” (Zittrain, 2008: p.70). This resonates well with innovation literature, which emphasizes the combinatorial aspect of innovation and the value of open and distributed ...

The concept of the extended mind, as introduced by Clark and Chalmers (1998) was meant in part to move beyond the standard Cartesian idea that cognition is something that happens in a private mental space, “in the head.” Elsewhere (Gallagher 2011; Gallagher and Crisafi 2009), I’ve pursued a liberal interpretation of the extended mind, suggesting that we consider cognitive processes as constitut...

When participants classify pictures of objects as upright or inverted with a left or right keypress, responses are faster if the response location (left/right) corresponds with the location of a handle (left/right) than if it does not. This result has typically been attributed to a grasping affordance (automatic activation of muscles associated with grasping the object with the ipsilateral hand...

In 1979, Gibson first advanced the idea that the sight of graspable objects automatically activates in the observer the repertoire of actions necessary to interact with them, even in the absence of any intention to act ("affordance effect"). The neurophysiological substrate of this effect was later identified in a class of bimodal neurons, the so-called "canonical" neurons, located within monke...

Humanoid robots that have to operate in cluttered and unstructured environments, such as man-made and natural disaster scenarios, require sophisticated sensorimotor capabilities. A crucial prerequisite for the successful execution of whole-body locomotion and manipulation tasks in such environments is the perception of the environment and the extraction of associated environmental affordances.,...

We developed an affordance-based methodology to support environmentally conscious behavior (ECB) that conserves resources such as materials, energy, etc. While studying concepts that aim to support ECB, we noted that characteristics of products that enable ECB tend to be more accurately described as affordances than functions. Therefore, we became interested in affordances, and specifically how...