The use of social and collaborative computing has the potential of assisting learning and improving the ability to work together as part of a team. Team work is a graduate attribute that students need to acquire before transitioning from university into the workplace. The aim of this exploratory research was to provide insights into the use of social and collaborative applications by Computer S...

Perceived objects automatically potentiate afforded action. Object affordances also facilitate perception of such objects, and this occurrence is known as the affordance effect. This study examined whether object affordances facilitate the initial visual processing stage, or perceptual entry processes, using the temporal order judgment task. The onset of the graspable (right-handled) coffee cup...

Organizations hoping to improve employee productivity, increase strategic advantages, and gain or hold the competitive edge have invested heavily in information and communication technology (ICT). Similarly, ICT development firms and other stakeholders have struggled to attract potential consumers, increase consumer loyalty, and stimulate continued ICT use. Yet despite such heavy investment and...

We review the psychological notion of affordances and examine it anew from a cognitive systems perspective. We distinguish between environmental affordances and their internal representation, choosing to focus on the latter. We consider issues that arise in representing mental affordances, using them to understand and generate plans, and learning them from experience. In each case, we present t...

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...

Movement in Parkinson's disease (PD) is strongly influenced by sensory stimuli. Here, we investigated two features of visual stimuli known to affect response times in healthy individuals; the spatial location of an object (the spatial effect) and its action-relevance (the 'affordance' effect). Poliakoff et al. (2007) found that while PD patients show normal spatial effects, they do not show an ...

This paper is a comparative study of gestural interaction with musical sound, designed to gain insight into the notion of musical affordance on interactive music systems. We conducted an interview base user study trialing three accelerometer based devices, an iPhone, a Wii-mote, and an Axivity Wax prototype, with four kinds of musical sound, including percussion, stringed instruments, and voice...

Interactions between human and objects are made through specific features of the object, which are adequate to the task context. During interactions, the perceived features vary according to the context. Affordances are the messages that products provide and users perceive in such a way that user actions are naturally induced with the help of such messages. In this research, we define affordanc...

We propose AffordanceNet, a new deep learning approach to simultaneously detect multiple objects and their affordances from RGB images. Our AffordanceNet has two branches: an object detection branch to localize and classify the object, and an affordance detection branch to assign each pixel in the object to its most probable affordance label. The proposed framework employs three key components ...