Aalto University, P.O. Box 11000, FI-00076 Aalto www.aalto.fi Author Seppo Heikkilä Name of the doctoral dissertation Affordance-Based Task Communication Methods for Astronaut-Robot Cooperation Publisher School of Electrical Engineering Unit Automation and Systems Technology Series Aalto University publication series DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS 102/2011 Field of research Automation technology Manusc...

Stimulus position is coded even if it is task-irrelevant, leading to faster response times when the stimulus and the response locations are compatible (spatial Stimulus-Response Compatibility-spatial SRC). Faster responses are also found when the handle of a visual object and the response hand are located on the same side; this is known as affordance effect (AE). Two contrasting accounts for AE...

to have any psychological validity. Further work is called for, and we suspect a fertile area will be in defining homomorphisms between the groups of different system representations: for example, between the physical user interface and the structure of the transition system ‘underneath’ it. There is also a mischief element in human nature that our examples can highlight as another form of affo...

If autonomous agents like humans and robots act in physical space, several types of conflicts can occur that result from the fact that actions occupy space. To avoid such conflicts, social robots must have the capacity to consider the actions taken by other robots and by humans. This thesis proposes a conceptual framework which can be used to specify knowledge about spatial needs of activities ...

Some objects in our environment are strongly tied to motor actions, a phenomenon called object affordance. A cup, for example, affords us to reach out to it and grasp it by its handle. Studies indicate that merely viewing an affording object triggers motor activations in the brain. The present study investigated whether object affordance would also result in an attention bias, that is, whether ...

Previous studies have shown that visual extinction can be reduced if two objects are positioned to "afford" an action. Here we tested if this affordance effect was disrupted by "breaking" the affordance, i.e., if one of the objects actively used in the action had a broken handle. We assessed the effects of broken affordance on recovery from extinction in eight patients with right hemisphere les...

Our thesis in this paper is that, in order to appreciate the interplay between cognitive (goal-directed) and physical performance in tool use, it is necessary to determine the role that representations play in the use of tools. We argue that rather being solely a matter of internal (mental) representation, tool use makes use of the external representations that define the human-environment-tool...

Limb apraxia, a disorder of higher order motor control, has long been a challenge for clinical assessment and understanding (Leiguarda and Marsden, 2000). The deficits originally described in limb apraxia (Liepmann, 1920) have been classified by the nature of the errors made by the patients leading to, namely, ideational and ideomotor apraxia. The dual stream hypothesis (Goodale and Milner, 199...

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have known impairments in social and motor skills. Identifying putative underlying mechanisms of these impairments could lead to improved understanding of the etiology of core social/communicative deficits in ASDs, and identification of novel intervention targets. The ability to perceptually integrate one's physical capacities with one's environ...