The theory of affordances, a conceptual pillar of the ecological approach to perception and action, has the potential to become a guiding principle for research on perception and action in sport. Affordances are opportunities for action. They describe the environment in terms of behaviors that are possible at a given moment under a given set of conditions. Affordances capture the tight coupling...

Understanding the role of ICT for development is at the core of ICT4D research. However, prevailing research in this field most often focuses on access or readiness of a technology, or on the outcomes of the technology use. Less attention has been paid to understand the mechanism of the technology use that leads to the outcomes. The question of why ICT in a development context sometimes work an...

The concept of affordances, introduced by J.J. Gibson in Psychology, has recently attracted interest in autonomous robotics towards the development of cognitive systems. In earlier work (Şahin et al., Adaptive Behavior, vol.15(4), pp. 447-472, 2007), we reviewed the uses of this concept in different fields and proposed a formalism to use affordances at different levels of robot control. In this...

The mere observation of pictures or words referring to manipulable objects is sufficient to evoke their affordances since objects and their nouns elicit components of appropriate motor programs associated with object interaction. While nobody doubts that objects actually evoke motor information, the degree of automaticity of this activation has been recently disputed. Recent evidence has indeed...

The role of affordances In our opinion the model would be improved if affordance for action mechanisms were integrated: The potentiation of motor interactions consistent with the conventional use of a perceived tool (Bub et al., 2008). Affordances would easily explain the mechanism underlying the quick choice of the most appropriate tool when an action goal is given. In Figure 1A, bidirectional...

How do we know that a kitchen is a kitchen by looking? Relatively little is known about how we conceptualize and categorize different visual environments. Traditional models of visual perception posit that scene categorization is achieved through the recognition of a scene's objects, yet these models cannot account for mounting evidence that human observers are relatively insensitive to the loc...