The field of functional recognition or affordance estimation from images has seen a revival in recent years. As originally proposed by Gibson, the affordances of a scene were directly perceived from the ambient light: in other words, functional properties like sittable were estimated directly from incoming pixels. Recent work, however, has taken a mediated approach in which affordances are deri...

An autonomous robot should be able to evaluate the affordances that are offered by a given situation. Here we address this problem by designing a system that can densely predict affordances given only a single 2D RGB image. This is achieved with a convolutional neural network (ResNet), which we combine with refinement modules recently proposed for addressing semantic image segmentation. We defi...

The paper examines the notion that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have affordances that epitomize the features of our late modern age (Giddens, 1991) and explores whether these affordances (Salomon, 1993, p. 51) can be used to facilitate particular approaches to educational practice. It argues that a clear articulation of these affordances would enable us to understand how the...

Clinical observations of kinesia paradoxica and freezing in patients with Parkinson's disease suggest that the automatic activation of motor programmes by visual stimuli may not require intact basal ganglia function, and that an increased sensitivity to such object affordances may contribute to some symptoms of the disease. Employing a paradigm that measures the degree of interference from obje...

iv CHAPTER 1. GENERAL INTRODUCTION 1 Dissertation Organization 3 References 4 CHAPTER 2. CONCEPTUALIZING AFFORDANCES FROM A COGNITIVE VIEWPOINT 5 Abstract 5 Introduction 5 Overview of Article 5 Why Consider Affordances? 6 The Original Meaning of Affordance 7 Different Theoretical Views of Affordance 9 Our Perspective and Motivation 10 A Cognitive System Perspective 14 Working Memory 15 The Impa...

The experience of virtual environments is often based on contradictions: the user should perceive the environment and objects as real, and yet the behavior of the environment is typically unreal; the user should accept the world as a temporary reality, yet at the same time interact with it magically. At the core of these differences is affordances and the question: Are virtual affordances the s...

The concept of affordance has been brought to HCI by Don Norman, who has recently protested against its misuse by designers. They say they will put affordances in the interface, or afford this or that to the users, but Norman points out that affordances only exist inasmuch as they are perceived by users. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to use the term as designers do. This paper takes the desi...

It has been conceived that children learn new objects through their affordances, that is, the actions that can be taken on them. We suggest that web pages also have affordances defined in terms of the users’ information need they meet. An assumption of the proposed approach is that different parts of a text may not be equally important / relevant to a given query. Judgment on the relevance of a...

In this study we untangle the sociomaterial interactions between developers, users, and artifacts by analyzing what types of affordances occur in the interactions between actors and artifacts in the context of group generativity. Hereto, we conducted an indepth ethnographic and interaction analysis of video data of the interactions of groups of people with each other and with a set of self-deve...

The concept of affordance has been brought to HCI by Don Norman, who has recently protested against its misuse by designers. They say they will put affordances in the interface, or afford this or that to the users, but Norman points out that affordances only exist inasmuch as they are perceived by users. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to use the term as designers do. This paper takes the desi...