There is much positive research on computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments in asynchronous distributed learning groups (DLGs). There is also research that shows that contemporary CSCL environments do not completely fulfil expectations on supporting interactive group learning, shared understanding, social construction of knowledge, and acquisition of competencies. There app...

The idea that to perceive an object is to perceive its affordances—that is, the interactions of the perceiver with the world that the object supports or affords—is attractive from the point of view of theories in cognitive science that emphasize the fundamental role of actions in representing an agent’s knowledge about the world. However, in this general form, the notion has so far lacked a for...

In this paper, we present an approach for robot learning of social affordance from human activity videos. We consider the problem in the context of human-robot interaction: Our approach learns structural representations of human-human (and human-object-human) interactions, describing how body-parts of each agent move with respect to each other and what spatial relations they should maintain to ...

In this paper, we present an approach for robot learning of social affordance from human activity videos. We consider the problem in the context of human-robot interaction: Our approach learns structural representations of human-human (and human-object-human) interactions, describing how body-parts of each agent move with respect to each other and what spatial relations they should maintain to ...

This paper develops and evaluates a new tensor field representation to express the geometric affordance of one object over another. We expand the well known bisector surface representation to one that is weight-driven and that retains the provenance of surface points with directional vectors. We also incorporate the notion of affordance keypoints which allow for faster decisions at a point of q...

The bidirectional control procedure was used to determine whether pigeons (Columba livia) would imitate a demonstrator that pushed a sliding screen for food. One group of observers saw a trained demonstrator push a sliding screen door with its beak (imitation group), whereas 2 other groups watched the screen move independently (possibly learning how the environment works) with a conspecific eit...

In this paper, we consider the influence of Gibson's affordance theory on the design of robotic agents. Affordance theory (and the ecological approach to agent design in general) has in many cases contributed to the development of successful robotic systems; we provide a brief survey of AI research in this area. However, there remain significant issues that complicate discussions on this topic,...

In an ERP study we investigate the time course of the interaction between the lexically specified telic role of a noun and the contextually provided ad-hoc affordance induced by a linguistic discourse. If preceded by a neutral discourse context, a verb inconsistent with the telic role in a sentence elicits an enhanced N400 compared to a congruent verb. However, if the preceding discourse contex...

The purpose of this study was to explore how users perceive the affordances of an object from specific operation tasks. These affordances can be specified in terms of perceptual information. To this end, the eye-tracking technique was employed to capture what product parts uses’ fixation focused on when using a product for specific operational tasks. The results show that, for physical-behavior...