A wide literature of predominantly behavioural experiments that use Stimulus Response Compatibility (SRC) have suggested that visual action information such as object affordance yields rapid and concurrent activation of visual and motor brain areas, but has rarely provided direct evidence for this proposition. This thesis examines some of the key claims from the affordance literature by applyin...

Affordance perception is critical to adaptive behavior. It comprises the ability to evaluate whether the environment and the actor's capabilities enable particular actions. It remains unclear how brain damage and its behavioral sequela impact this ability. Two affordance based judgment tasks were applied in healthy young adults that were adapted for prospective diagnostic purposes in patients. ...

When skill acquisition involves a shift in strategy (such as from rule-based to retrieval-based processing), older adults typically shift later in practice than young adults do. We observed the shift from scanning-based to memory-based processing in a noun pair learning task. Young and older adults were trained in conditions in which the relationship between memory load and scanning load was ma...

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...

Research has shown that the meaningfulness of the material increases judged size, whereas symmetry decreases size judgments. These findings have been interpreted in terms of information processing, with a greater quantity of information leading to a judgment of larger size. An alternative view based on biofunctional understanding theory emphasizes the quality of affordance-triggered biological ...

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...

In the past decade, significant progress has been made in autonomous driving, and many novel computer vision methods have been proposed for vision-based autonomous driving. To date, most of these systems can be categorized into two major paradigms: mediated perception approaches and behavior reflex approaches. Mediated perception approaches [7] involve multiple sub-components for recognizing dr...

Title of dissertation: From Form to Function: Detecting the Affordance of Tool Parts using Geometric Features and Material Cues Austin O. Myers, Doctor of Philosophy, 2016 Dissertation directed by: Professor Yiannis Aloimonos Department of Computer Science With recent advances in robotics, general purpose robots like Baxter are quickly becoming a reality. As robots begin to collaborate with hum...

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...