Mobile technologies such as smartphones and tablets have been rapidly adopted worldwide. Mobile media are now the primary online connection for most individuals. Despite this rapid rise, theories of how mobile media relate to communication patterns and outcomes remain scarce. An affordances approach promises a high-level framework for researching how technologies such as mobile media are integr...

This study extends the learning and use of affordances on robots on two fronts. First, we use the very same affordance learning framework that was used for learning the affordances of inanimate things to learn social affordances, that is affordances whose existence requires the presence of humans. Second, we use the learned affordances for making multi-step plans. Specifically, an iCub humanoid...

In the current paper I will argue that the notion of affordances offers an alternative to theory of mind (ToM) approaches in studying social engagement in general and in explaining social engagement in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) specifically. Affordances are the possibilities for action offered by the environment. In contrast to ToM approaches, the concept of affordances implies the complem...

Objects in human environments support various functionalities which govern how people interact with their environments in order to perform tasks. In this work, we discuss how to represent and learn a functional understanding of an environment in terms of object affordances. Such an understanding is useful for many applications such as activity detection and assistive robotics. Starting with a s...

This study investigated students’ perceptions towards the affordances and challenges of integrating mobile learning (m-learning) into an undergraduate course. It also examined the impact of students’ gender on their perceived affordances and challenges. The relationship between students’ perceived affordances and perceived challenges of m-learning was also explored. Questionnaires distributed t...

Representational Affordances are distributed representations extended across external (the environment) and internal (the organism) representations. Usability problem of Clinical Research Information System (CRIS) is a major barrier for their acceptance. Design of user interface (representation) is very important to the functionality and usability of CRIS. We propose that the user interface wit...

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to clarify the concept of affordances, as introduced by Maier and Fadel, to relate affordances to function, to try to reduce confusion about both of these terms by providing a detailed model, and to expose some of the existing research on function to a wider audience. The paper starts by constructing a model of function that relates devices to an environm...