Affordances as Properties of the Animal-Environment System

Stoffregen, Thomas A.

doi:10.1207/s15326969eco1502_2

Cited by 460 publications

(226 citation statements)

References 37 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

172

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…But whether drownability or floatability, tied to information specified by the properties of water, could be denoted as affordance is a controversial debate. In the past three decades in the community of theorists regarding the definition of the term (see Jones, 2003;Sahin, et al, 2006), theorists from many different disciplines, such as ecological psychology (e.g., Stoffregen, 2003;Turvey, 1992), product design (e.g., You& Chen, 2002), computer science (e.g., Norman, 1988), robot-making technology (i.e., robotics) and artificial intelligence (e.g., Rome et al, 2006), applied linguistics (e.g., Nguyen& Kellogg, 2005) and education (e.g., Greeno, 1994), have been contributing many arguments to the debate. Sahin et al (2006) conclude that none of the scholars mentioned above articulate a concrete definition of affordances.…”

Section: Affordances and Semioticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecosystem-Wide Characteristics of an ESL Environment in Situ: An Affordance-Semiotics Perspective

Lai

2013

IJLL

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract:Investigating the phenomenon of how a learning environment affords opportunities for individual learners to learn has recently become an increasing interest among researchers of applied linguistics and psychology. Traditional perspective in this regard has tended to limit the phenomenon to the environment's rigid conditions and novices' controlled responses; less attention has been given to exploring the potential light that broader strategies from other academic approaches may shed upon emergent relationships between the ever-changing environment and developing actions. With this trend in mind, this paper takes an ecological model based on the theory of affordances and semiotics of signs-a scope of epistemological thinking that conceives the inquiry as a second language (L2) learning ecology or an environmental system to supporting L2 learning actions. Upon this orientation, emphasis is placed on discovering actions situated in their original context (or in situ) and then the emergence of "ecosystem-wide characteristics". By "ecosystem" it is meant that all interrelated levels of contexts are fundamental to the nature of connecting students to L2 learning. The research focused on a group of four secondary-school students in Hong Kong, in an after-school ESL (English as a second language) program over 12 lessons, examining a range of teaching-learning activities. In this paper, the ecology concerned is of informational signs interlocked for meaning-making purposes; one where signs flowed along direct and immediate perception-action heuristics for achieving L2 learning goals. Drawing upon the notion of "education-friendliness" (i.e., providing students with greater access to diverse sources of information for learning), there are implications for educational practitioners to use real-world engagement that is likely to tap students' creativity and ignite motivational sparks for using L2 to understand the world more actively and strategically.

show abstract

Section: Affordances and Semioticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecosystem-Wide Characteristics of an ESL Environment in Situ: An Affordance-Semiotics Perspective

Lai

2013

IJLL

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Affordances are often seen as either relational qualities, that exist as relation between the environment and the agent (e.g. [32]), or as qualities of (an object in) the environment taken with reference to the agent. The latter view would benefit from an ODP for referential qualities.…”

Section: Affordancesmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Ontology Design Pattern for Referential Qualities

Ortmann

Daniel

2011

The Semantic Web – ISWC 2011

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. Referential qualities are qualities of an entity taken with reference to another entity. For example the vulnerability of a coast to sea level rise. In contrast to most non-relational qualities which only depend on their host, referential qualities require a referent additional to their host, i.e. a quality Q of an entity X taken with reference to another entity R. These qualities occur frequently in ecological systems, which make concepts from these systems challenging to model in formal ontology. In this paper, we discuss exemplary resilience, vulnerability and affordance as qualities of an entity taken with reference to an external factor. We suggest an ontology design pattern for referential qualities. The design pattern is anchored in the foundational ontology DOLCE and evaluated using implementations for the notions affordance, resilience and vulnerability.

show abstract

“…A generally accepted aspect of the theory of affordances is that it relates the opportunities provided by the environment to the abilities of the agent, instead of expressing a property of the environment alone [17], [14]. Learning from experience thus appears as a natural way of discovering grasp affordances.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Refining grasp affordance models by experience

Detry

Kraft

Buch

et al. 2010

2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract-We present a method for learning object grasp affordance models in 3D from experience, and demonstrate its applicability through extensive testing and evaluation on a realistic and largely autonomous platform. Grasp affordance refers here to relative object-gripper configurations that yield stable grasps. These affordances are represented probabilistically with grasp densities, which correspond to continuous density functions defined on the space of 6D gripper poses. A grasp density characterizes an object's grasp affordance; densities are linked to visual stimuli through registration with a visual model of the object they characterize. We explore a batch-oriented, experience-based learning paradigm where grasps sampled randomly from a density are performed, and an importance-sampling algorithm learns a refined density from the outcomes of these experiences. The first such learning cycle is bootstrapped with a grasp density formed from visual cues. We show that the robot effectively applies its experience by downweighting poor grasp solutions, which results in increased success rates at subsequent learning cycles. We also present success rates in a practical scenario where a robot needs to repeatedly grasp an object lying in an arbitrary pose, where each pose imposes a specific reaching constraint, and thus forces the robot to make use of the entire grasp density to select the most promising achievable grasp.

show abstract

Affordances as Properties of the Animal-Environment System

Cited by 460 publications

References 37 publications

Ecosystem-Wide Characteristics of an ESL Environment in Situ: An Affordance-Semiotics Perspective

Ecosystem-Wide Characteristics of an ESL Environment in Situ: An Affordance-Semiotics Perspective

An Ontology Design Pattern for Referential Qualities

Refining grasp affordance models by experience

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About