Affordances, context and sociality

Canonical affordances in context

James Gibson’s concept of affordances was an attempt to undermine the traditional dualism of the objective and subjective. Gibson himself insisted on the continuity of “affordances in general” and those attached to human artifacts. However, a crucial distinction needs to be drawn between “affordances in general” and the “canonical affordances” that are connected primarily to artifacts. Canonica...

From Affordances to Situated Affordances in Robotics - Why Context is Important

We propose situated affordances as an extension to the well known concept of affordances. Situated affordances extend affordances by taking the environmental context, in which an object is embedded, into account. We argue that the extended concept allows the learning of qualitatively more complex tasks. In this paper we report the conceptual result of ongoing work in which a cognitive robotic a...

Network Analysis in sociality

Agents and Sociality

Since the beginning of multiagent systems research, it has been argued that theories from the realm of the social sciences can be of help for building multiagent systems, and to some extent vice versa. This study sketches the concepts necessary for agents based on social theories. These theories include theories on decision making, various ra-tionality and action models, and the role and modeli...

Sociality, Evolution and Cognition

Variations in brain size and proportions can be linked to the cognitive capacities of different animal species, and correlations with ecology may give clues to the evolutionary origins of these specializations. Much recent evidence has implicated the social domain as a major challenge driving increases in problem-solving abilities of mammals. However, the methods of measurement available to res...