Conceptualizing place attachment affordance: Exploring an affordance-based approach to place attachment

This conceptual paper proposes an affordance-based framework for assessment that builds on an ecological paradigm and highlights how linguistic competence is enacted through interaction over time. Six interrelated foci, emergence, reciprocity, resonance, negotiation, disruption and reclamation, and latent trajectories, are introduced as analytic lenses for tracing how learners generate, share, adapt, and revisit linguistic opportunities in action. Through illustrative vignettes and comparative analysis, the paper demonstrates how these foci can be documented and reported through an Ecological Affordance Profile, which integrates micro-level observations, formative records, and summative accounts into a coherent developmental history. Rather than replacing existing forms of outcome assessment, the framework complements them by offering ecological validity and developmental sensitivity, and it provides trace-back capacity when discrepancies arise between test results and classroom evidence. The conclusion calls for reconceptualizing language assessment as an ongoing ecological process that affirms learner agency, sustains growth, and generates a more comprehensive account of communicative competence.

Introduction. This paper uses the affordances framework to investigate how Generation Z (GenZ) students in higher education use generative AI (GenAI). There is an increasing need to gain a deeper understanding of GenZ’s interaction with artificial intelligence tools to better support their integration into higher education and the workforce. Method. Data was collated from semi-structured interviews with 34 GenZ students in higher education. Analysis. Thematic analysis was conducted on the qualitative data collected from the semi-structured interviews. Results. The findings suggest GenZ students have seamlessly integrated GenAI into diverse aspects of their lives. This study highlighted three main GenAI affordances that resonate with GenZ students: a) content searching and curation b) content generation and ideation, and c) content enhancement and refinement, revealing new opportunities for information access. Conclusions. This study shed light on the perceived affordances of GenAI for GenZs, addressing a gap in the current literature on GenAI. The findings underscore the significant extent to which GenAI has been integrated into GenZ students’ daily lives. Our study contributes to a better understanding of how GenAI’s affordances facilitate and support GenZ students, providing invaluable insights that can inform future policies on developing literacy for AI use tailored to this group.

The vitality and affective potential of the live concert experience is a result of rich, cross-sensory interactions and varied participatory practices. The complexity of such entanglements has recently led philosophers to argue for an enactive, affordance-based approach that interrogates a variety of perceptual and sensory possibilities inherent in aesthetic experiences. Further, Shaun Gallagher's recent addition of the 4As (Affect, Agency, Affordance, Autonomy) to the 4Es (Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, Extended) for clarifying mind–world relations seem to have potent explanatory power for these kinds of encounters. Building on such current philosophical approaches while examining specific (and actual) live musical engagement, this article offers an interpretation of selected audience data from the MusicLab Copenhagen with the Danish String Quartet research concert to discuss particular responses from the audience physically present at the venue. Responding to neuroaesthetic approaches, we clarify the audience members’ individual and collective aesthetic experience through an enactive, affordance-based approach. We suggest that what is at play in the live concert environment is a mode of attentive dynamic listening. Rather than seeking to characterize the audience as passively responding to music, a 4Es/4As approach to aesthetic experience seeks to clarify embodied-enactive audience engagement for which anticipation is a dynamic factor that enables further musical action and resonance, also for the musicians on stage.

ABSTRACT Selective permeability holds that people’s distinct capacities allow them to do different things in a space, making it unequally accessible. Though mainly applied to urban geography so far, we propose selective permeability as an affordance-based approach for understanding diversity in education. This has advantages. First, it avoids dismissing lower achievements as necessarily coming from “within” students, instead locating challenges in the environment. This implies that settings (not just people) need remedial attention, also raising questions about normative judgments in disability nomenclature. Second, affordances can be negotiated in numerous ways to reach a goal, analogously to how people with missing arms have learned to drive with their feet, so restrictive problem-solving methods are often counterproductive. Third, our approach illuminates how cultural factors ranging from gait styles to language and hence group coordination modulate action possibilities, so that cultural groups may encounter objectively different affordances in the same classroom. But fourth, while fit with environment allows for skill refinement, non-fit can contribute to growth situations, which suggests a degree of selective closure can be desirable. Throughout, we argue social constructs – including educational ones – are literally built or enacted barriers or openings that have reality in environments in the same way that affordances do.

ABSTRACT Affordances are action-possibilities, ways of relating to and acting on things in our world. They help us understand how these things mean what they do and how we have bodily access to our world more generally. But what happens when this access is ruptured or impeded? I consider this question in the context of psychopathology and reports that describe this experience. I argue that thinking about the bodily consequences of losing access to everyday affordances can help us better understand these reports. An affordance-based approach to psychopathology can illuminate some of the causes, as well as the experiential character and consequences, of affective disorders and diminished spatial agency in self-world disturbances. It also highlights some under-explored ethical and political dimensions of these issues that need further attention.

Abstract This article examines how requests for confirmation (RfCs) can be used as devices for challenging or disagreeing with another participant, their talk, or their action(s) in informal interaction. Based on their defining pragmatic characteristics, we identify two generic interactional affordances RfCs offer their speakers: (1) a capacity to do questioning and (2) a capacity to forward propositional content. While these two affordances are generally utilized together, one or the other may be mobilized more strongly when bringing off challenging or disagreement-implicative actions. Drawing on interactional data in (Peninsular) Spanish and (American) English, and using conversation analytic methods, we illustrate how participants may differentially draw on these two basic affordances with respect to two major classes of “challengeables”: (1) a co-participant’s claims and assertions (or the stances with which they are delivered), and (2) a co-participant’s plans or decisions. We end with a discussion of the usefulness of an affordance-based approach.

A growing number of theorists have looked to the enactivist approach in philosophy of mind or the affordance-based approach from ecological psychology to make sense of a wide variety of phenomena; some theorists believe that these theoretical accounts can offer rich insights about the nature of mental disorders, their etiology, and their characteristic symptoms. I argue that theorists who adopt such approaches also should embrace the further claim that all mental disorders are affective disorders. First, enactivist accounts of mental disorder push us toward such a view insofar as they characterize such conditions in terms of disordered sense-making and conceptualize sense-making as fundamentally affective. Second, conceptions of mental disorder that emphasize affordance perception likewise motivate such a view insofar as they highlight the role that affectivity plays in the disclosure of action possibilities. What is more, both sense-making and affordance disclosure are best understood as processes of selective attention and responsiveness that rely heavily on affectivity. To illustrate and support these claims, I discuss how (a) language disturbances in schizophrenia and (b) “context blindness” in autism both result from disruptions to affectivity and selective attention that make it difficult for subjects to engage effectively with relevant affordances.

ABSTRACT This paper presents a critical account of the way in which university marketing, public communication of science, and crisis narratives about autism are made to intersect in three promotional videos. The videos highlight research conducted at one UK and two US universities and showcase using social robots to diagnose and treat autistic children. The paper begins by contextualizing how a problematic model of autism informs calls for intervention as well as representations of autism in the videos themselves. Taking a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis Approach, the paper then describes three interrelated processes at work in the university videos: commodification, technologization and codification. Together, these concepts encapsulate the way in which the videos work as both institutional self-promotion and promotion of a particular perspective on communication. Informed by Ledin and Machin’s affordance-based approach in which choices in semiotic materials are first described and then analyzed as multimodal articulations, the video analysis attends to the use of narrative stages, scenes and settings, characters, rhythm and sound, and language and evaluations. What the analysis demonstrates is how the videos are both exercises in university commodification and responses to crisis autism and that this is done so as to make them seem complimentary projects.

TikTok is without any doubt the most popular social media among Gen Zers. Originally born as a lip-syncing app, it can be exploited in different ways; as such, it represents a new fertile space for political communication. In this vein, previous studies have shown that politicians all over the planet are joining the platform as a tool to connect with younger audiences. This study examines the use of TikTok in the last presidential elections in Peru. Following an affordance-based approach, we analyze all the TikToks published by the main candidates (Pedro Castillo, Keiko Fujimori, Rafael Lopez Aliaga, Hernando de Soto, and George Forsyth) during the electoral campaign, to understand if and how candidates have integrated this platform as part of their electoral strategy and what kind of content they publish and share. Through a content analysis that combines quantitative and qualitative elements, we demonstrate that, although all the analyzed politicians have opened TikTok accounts, they do not seem to take full advantage of the platform’s affordances displaying a top-down communication style with almost no deliberative nor participative intentions. Political issues are almost absent since the platform is mostly used to display their personal life and enhance their political persona, with most of the content displaying a clear entertaining dimension. Some differences are discussed but, in general, results reveal that Peruvian candidates use TikTok almost uniquely for politainment.

Abstract Chronic pain is one of the most disabling medical conditions globally, yet, to date, we lack a satisfying theoretical framework for research and clinical practice. Over the prior decades, several frameworks have been presented with biopsychosocial models as the most promising. However, in translation to clinical practice, these models are often applied in an overly reductionist manner, leaving much to be desired. In particular, they often fail to characterize the complexities and dynamics of the lived experience of chronic pain. Recently, an enactive, affordance-based approach has been proposed, opening up new ways to view chronic pain. This model characterizes how the persistence of pain alters a person’s field of affordances: the unfolding set of action possibilities that a person perceives as available to them. The affordance-based model provides a promising perspective on chronic pain as it allows for a systematic investigation of the interactive relation between patients and their environment, including characteristic alterations in the experience of their bodies and the space they inhabit. To help bridge the gap from philosophy to clinical practice, we unpack in this paper the core concepts of an affordance-based approach to chronic pain and their clinical implications, highlighting aspects that have so far received insufficient attention. We do so with an analogy to playing video games, as we consider such comparative illustration a useful tool to convey the complex concepts in an affordance-based model and further explore central aspects of the lived experience of chronic pain.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a psychopathological condition characterized by persistent deficits in social interaction and communication, and restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. To build an ecological-enactive account of autism, I propose we should endorse the affordance-based approach of the skilled intentionality framework (SIF). In SIF, embodied cognition is understood as skilled engagement with affordances in the sociomaterial environment of the ecological niche by which an individual tends toward the optimal grip. The human econiche offers a whole landscape of affordances, and situated individuals respond to a field of relevant affordances. An important part of SIF is an ecological-enactive interpretation of the free energy principle and predictive processing. Predictive processing accounts indicate that in ASD too much precision is assigned to prediction errors. Autistic persons depend heavily on current sensory information and less on prior beliefs and cannot attune to stable regularities. To reduce uncertainty, they over-rely on routines, strict habits, and a familiar environment—a predictable ecological niche they construct. I argue that skilled intentionality gives us the framework from which to analyze the autistic field of affordances. Autistic patterns of affordance-related bodily states of action readiness are only sensitive to very specific solicitations in the environment and achieve optimal grip in well-known situations. Autism is to be understood as a disorder of bodily normativity. Taking this approach helps us figure out what neurotypical people can do to attune their environment in order to scaffold the needs of autistic individuals by redesigning the landscape of affordances.

The internet is often viewed as the source of a myriad of benefits and harms. However, there are problems with using this notion of “the internet” and other high-level concepts to explain the influence of communicating via everyday networked technologies on people and society. Here, we argue that research on social influence in computer-mediated communication (CMC) requires increased precision around how and why specific features of networked technologies interact with and impact psychological processes and outcomes. By reviewing research on the affordances of networked technologies, we demonstrate how the relationship between features of “the internet” and “online behaviour” can be determined by both the affordances of the environment and the psychology of the user and community. To achieve advances in this field, we argue that psychological science must provide nuanced and precise conceptualisations, operationalisations, and measurements of “internet use” and “online behaviour”. We provide a template for how future research can become more systematic by examining how and why variables associated with the individual user, networked technologies, and the online community interact and intersect. If adopted, psychological science will be able to make more meaningful predictions about online and offline outcomes associated with communicating via networked technologies.

In this interview article, we present a unique marriage of architecture heritage design and fundamental philosophy exemplified in the built works by Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances (RAAAF), a studio that works at the intersection of visual art, experimental architecture, and philosophy based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The conversation with Prix de Rome laureate Ronald Rietveld and Socrates Professor in Philosophy Erik Rietveld took place during the field visit to three RAAAF’s projects — Bunker 599 (2013), Deltawerk // (2018), and Still Life (2019) — where we examine the potential of affordance-based approach for rethinking and creating built heritage as (re)activation of past, present, and future.

This work creates a model of the value of different external viewpoints of a robot performing tasks. The current state of the practice is to use a teleoperated assistant robot to provide a view of a task being performed by a primary robot; however, the choice of viewpoints is ad hoc and does not always lead to improved performance. This research applies a psychomotor approach to develop a model of the relative quality of external viewpoints using Gibsonian affordances. In this approach, viewpoints for the affordances are rated based on the psychomotor behavior of human operators and clustered into manifolds of viewpoints with the equivalent value. The value of 30 viewpoints is quantified in a study with 31 expert robot operators for four affordances (reachability, passability, manipulability, and traversability) using a computer-based simulator of two robots. The adjacent viewpoints with similar values are clustered into ranked manifolds using agglomerative hierarchical clustering. The results show the validity of the affordance-based approach by confirming that there are manifolds of statistically significantly different viewpoint values, viewpoint values are statistically significantly dependent on the affordances, and viewpoint values are independent of a robot. Furthermore, the best manifold for each affordance provides a statistically significant improvement with a large Cohen's d effect size (1.1-2.3) in the performance (improving time by 14%-59% and reducing errors by 87%-100%) and improvement in the performance variation over the worst manifold. This model will enable autonomous selection of the best possible viewpoint and path planning for the assistant robot.

Virtual reality (VR) technology can help students conduct a design evaluation process on their architecture studio course submission. This study explores an architectural design evaluation method that uses an affordance-based design approach with two phases: “Non-VR (NVR) prior to VR” and “NVR followed by VR.” A game-engine-based VR system was developed for this research. The simulated VR system used information from building information modeling (BIM) models to provide information about the evaluated architectural design. Participants evaluated submissions by recognizing the affordances and then mapping them using an affordance structure matrix. All data were evaluated to compare the evaluation results between the two phases. Generally, the evaluation process helps identify perceived affordances in design submissions. The different media provide additional feedback for students.

We commend Rietveld’s affordance-based approach to art and architecture for foregrounding an oft-neglected area in the cognitive sciences: the material dimension of human cognition, creativity and imagination. We suggest that supplementing the cross-disciplinary approach that Rietveld calls for with insights from archaeology and anthropology can not only help us create futures ‘with human touch’ but also gain a deeper understanding creativity more broadly.

Studies on children’s hospital play in both indoor and outdoor settings have indicated relative degrees of psychological support for children's health restoration process. This Paediatric-centered action research with children in ambulatory and non-ambulatory care employs an affordance-based approach with loose play items, termed features-user affordance, to enhance hospitalized children’s restoration. The objective of this study is to ascertain the value of Paediatric play using loose items in a Nigerian hospital context. The benefits are measured in terms of children's behaviours such as movement and interaction with their peers and caregivers, as a result of the treatment they have received in the ward as a play setting. Twelve children, aged 3-7 years, from the Paediatric ward of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University Teaching Hospital in Bauchi, were selected to receive treatment in a ward cubicle designed with loose play items. Their behavioural responses were elicited by the researcher using video recording of their actions and behaviours. This was followed by structured interviews with caregivers comprising six physicians and nine nurses. The data was analysed using descriptive content analysis. It was found that play using loose items increased movement, engaged and sustained social interaction and verbal conversations. Responses from caregivers indicated changes in children’s behaviour in terms of child management and cooperation. The study suggests that loose play items as intervention measures provide a complementary approach for supporting hospitalized children’s functioning in Paediatric ward settings.

Perception and manipulation tasks for robotic manipulators involving highly-cluttered objects have become increasingly indemand for achieving a more efficient problem solving method in modern industrial environments. But, most of the available methods for performing such cluttered tasks failed in terms of performance, mainly due to inability to adapt to the change of the environment and the handled objects. Here, we propose a new, near real-time approach to suction-based grasp point estimation in a highly cluttered environment by employing an affordance-based approach. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our proposed method offers two distinctive contributions. First, we use a modified deep neural network backbone for the input of the semantic segmentation, to classify pixel elements of the input red, green, blue and depth (RGBD) channel image which is then used to produce an affordance map, a pixel-wise probability map representing the probability of a successful grasping action in those particular pixel regions. Later, we incorporate a high speed semantic segmentation to the system, which makes our solution have a lower computational time. This approach does not need to have any prior knowledge or models of the objects since it removes the step of pose estimation and object recognition entirely compared to most of the current approaches and uses an assumption to grasp first then recognize later, which makes it possible to have an object-agnostic property. The system was designed to be used for household objects, but it can be easily extended to any kind of objects provided that the right dataset is used for training the models. Experimental results show the benefit of our approach which achieves a precision of 88.83%, compared to the 83.4% precision of the current state-of-the-art.

We review 4E (embodied, embedded, extended and enactive) approaches to the analysis of art and aesthetic experience. We argue that extended mind analyses that focus on tool use miss important aspects, and that it requires 4 or more E’s to address the broad spectrum of aesthetic experiences that correlate to the broad variety of artistic genres. We develop an enactive, affordance-based approach to understanding art and aesthetic experience. Considering both the potential and the limitations of any particular approach, we argue that there is no one unified set of principles that will make sense of all art everywhere.