Imitation is not only a powerful means to drastically downsize the exploration space when learning behavior. It also helps to align the learning efforts of a robot group towards a common goal. However, one prerequisite in imitation, the decision of which robot to imitate, is often factored out in current research. In our work we address this question by providing a means to measure the similari...

Cañal-Bruland and van der Kamp present an argument about the incommensurate relationship between affordance perception and spatial perception in a criticism of Proffitt and Linkenauger's phenotypic approach to perception. Many of their criticisms are based on a difference in the interpretation of the core ideas underlying the phenotypic approach. The most important of these differences in inter...

Motivation as key factor for maintaining effective learning must be maintained during computer-supported learning. For this, we attempt to investigate the benefits of a socially intelligent tutoring agent that goes beyond attending to aspects of an individual student, the tutoring friend. In a computer-supported learning system, a tutoring friend is an artificial agent that manages relationship...

This paper presents a formal model for gameplay based upon the affordances available to the player that are linked to game objects. It has been constructed via an extensive analysis of major first-person games 1998-2008, although it is argued it may extend to all diegetic games. Gameplay can be understood as a network of allowed actions, that can be summarised as a small number of archetypal af...

Bingham, Schmidt, & Rosenblum, (1989) showed that people are able to select, by hefting balls, the optimal weight for each size ball to be thrown farthest. We now investigate function learning and smart mechanisms as hypotheses about how this affordance is perceived. Twenty-four unskilled adult throwers learned to throw by practicing with a subset of balls that would only allow acquisition of t...

The IS research community is still struggling with a proper theorisation of the IT-artefact. The debate manifests in questions regarding the effect of IT (Markus and Silver 2008), the identity of systems (Reimers et al. 2009), or more generally the appropriate theoretical tools for studying these systems. Part of the quest for theorising the IT-artefact is whether technology possesses inherent ...

Extensive research has suggested that simply viewing an object can automatically prime compatible actions for object manipulation, known as affordances. Here we explored the generation of covert motor plans afforded by real objects with precision ('pinchable') or whole-hand/power ('graspable') grip significance under different types of vision. In Experiment 1, participants viewed real object pr...

The simple perception of an object can potentiate an associated action. This affordance effect depends heavily on the action context in which the object is presented. In recent years, psychologists, psychiatrists, and phenomenologists have agreed that subjects with schizophrenia may not perceive the affordances of people or objects that could lead to a loss of ease in their actions. We examined...

We present a novel method for learning and predicting the affordances of an object based on its physical and visual attributes. Affordance prediction is a key task in autonomous robot learning, as it allows a robot to reason about the actions it can perform in order to accomplish its goals. Previous approaches to affordance prediction have either learned direct mappings from visual features to ...

Affordances, as for example grasping possibilities, are known to play a role in the guidance of human attention but have not been considered in artificial attention systems so far. Extending our earlier work, we investigate the combination of affordance estimation and visual saliency in an artificial visual attention model. Different models based on saliency, affordance estimation, or their com...