The interaction of biological agents within the real world is based on their abilities and the affordances of the environment. By contrast, the classical view of perception considers only sensory features, as do most object recognition models. Only a few models make use of the information provided by the integration of sensory information as well as possible or executed actions. Neither the rel...

Road networks, roads, and junctions are examples of natural language terms whose semantics can be described by affordances of their physical referents. In order to define affordances in such a way that they can be used for classifying and describing instances in a geographic database, one has to deal with the problems of informational incompleteness and limited definability. In this paper, we p...

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...

Introduction One of the many goals of design research is to better understand the ways in which end users interact with the products of designing. This focus is not surprising—the ultimate measure of success for any design is the adoption by the user. The concept of affordance recently has been the focus of increased interest in the design research community because it captures well the relatio...

PERCEPTION AND ACTION ARE TIGHTLY LINKED objects may be perceived not only in terms of visual features, but also in terms of possibilities for action. Previous studies showed that when a centrally located object has a salient graspable feature (e.g., a handle), it facilitates motor responses corresponding with the feature's position. However, such so-called affordance effects have been criticiz...

Bingham, Schmidt, and Rosenblum (Bingham, G. P., Schmidt, R. C., & Rosenblum, L. D. (1989). Hefting for a maximum distance throw: A smart perceptual mechanism. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 15, 507-528) found that skilled throwers could heft objects and select the weight in each size that they could throw to a maximum distance. Bingham et al. hypothesized...

A detection scheme is presented for maneuvering affordance in noisy imagery. By introducing a mental maneuvering process within an intentional coordinate system, image features are assumed to be represented in terms of directional Fourier images. The detectability of affordance patterns has been verified through experimental studies.

Intuitive interactions are supported by users’ implicit and explicit learning experiences. But, determining user knowledge can be difficult. With many options available for eliciting that knowledge, we tested the effectiveness of two methods – performance and reflection. Users were presented with simple interactions that had varying levels of intuitiveness (affordance, convention, bias). They w...

This paper explores three potential affordances (social, technical and pedagogical) of wikis in the context of designing 32 teachers’ learning of classroom management cases. Two learning environments were designed and two groups of the teacher-participants posted their own written and audio cases, identified problems, discussed and proposed solutions with the input of their peers, in the respec...

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 ...