Action Affordances Research Articles

Unveiling task-dependent action affordance representations: Insights from scene-selective cortex and deep neural networks

Unveiling task-dependent action affordance representations: Insights from scene-selective cortex and deep neural networks

The long journey home: viapolitics in the journey of migrant labourers during COVID-19 lockdown in India

After the nationwide lockdown due to COVID-19 in 2020, India saw a mass departure of migrant labourers from urban to native rural areas on foot, by cycle or with available means of transportation due to unexpected unemployment and poverty. This paper attempts to analyse various instances of this incident from the documentary film 1232 KMs (2021) directed by Vinod Kapri. Analysing the film within the framework of viapolitics, this study looks at the mode of transportation used for migration, the routes, the geographical structure and possible challenges on migratory paths to analyse how they affect and influence the migrants and their migratory process. It focuses on the different experiences of migrants based on their mode of transportation as it generates different cultures of mobility and exposes the different affordances for governmental action like a nationwide shutdown. The study explores human struggles over boundaries, life, security, and death in such a migration, particularly considering the socio-economic conditions of the people involved. A viapolitical reading of migrant labourers’ displacement during lockdown thus becomes relevant in throwing light on how factors like vehicles, trajectories, geographical structure, etc., projected their politics during the pandemic.

Affording imagination

ABSTRACT Discussion of affordance perception focuses almost exclusively on affordances for non-mental actions like climbing, walking and eating. This paper asks whether we might also perceive affordances for a specific class of mental action: acts of imagination. We first explore how the environment can present opportunities for imaginative action. We then combine phenomenological and theoretical considerations to argue that we do indeed perceive affordances for imaginative action. Putting this claim to work, we apply the concept of imaginative affordances to the topics of imaginative skill and imaginative tools.

Neural representations of situations and mental states are composed of sums of representations of the actions they afford

Human behavior depends on both internal and external factors. Internally, people’s mental states motivate and govern their behavior. Externally, one’s situation constrains which actions are appropriate or possible. To predict others’ behavior, one must understand the influences of mental states and situations on actions. On this basis, we hypothesize that people represent situations and states in terms of associated actions. To test this, we use functional neuroimaging to estimate neural activity patterns associated with situations, mental states, and actions. We compute sums of the action patterns, weighted by how often each action occurs in each situation and state. We find that these summed action patterns reconstructed the corresponding situation and state patterns. These results suggest that neural representations of situations and mental states are composed of sums of their action affordances. Summed action representations thus offer a biological mechanism by which people can predict actions given internal and external factors.

ACTION AFFORDANCE AFFECTS PROXIMAL AND DISTAL GOAL-ORIENTED PLANNING.

Visual attention is mainly goal-directed and allocated based on the upcoming action. However, it is unclear how far this feature of gaze behavior generalizes in more naturalistic settings. The present study investigates the influence of action affordances on active inference processes revealed by eye movements during interaction with familiar and novel tools. In a between-subject design, a cohort of participants interacted with a VR controller in a low-realism environment; another performed the task with an interaction setup that allowed differentiated hand and finger movements in a high-realism environment. We investigated the differences in odds of fixations and their eccentricity towards the tool parts before action initiation. The results show that participants fixate more on the tool's effector part before action initiation when asked to produce tool-specific movements, especially with unfamiliar tools. These findings suggest that fixations are made in a task-oriented way to plan the distal goals of producing the task and tool-specific actions well before action initiation. Moreover, with more realistic action affordance, fixations were biased toward the tool handle when it was oriented incongruent with the subjects' handedness. We hypothesize that these fixations are made towards the proximal goal of planning the grasp even though the perceived action on the tools is identical for both experimental setups. Taken together, proximal and distal goal-oriented planning is contextualized to the realism of action/interaction afforded by an environment.

Prehensile and Non-Prehensile Robotic Pick-and-Place of Objects in Clutter Using Deep Reinforcement Learning.

In this study, we develop a framework for an intelligent and self-supervised industrial pick-and-place operation for cluttered environments. Our target is to have the agent learn to perform prehensile and non-prehensile robotic manipulations to improve the efficiency and throughput of the pick-and-place task. To achieve this target, we specify the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) and deploy a deep reinforcement learning (RL) temporal difference model-free algorithm known as the deep Q-network (DQN). We consider three actions in our MDP; one is 'grasping' from the prehensile manipulation category and the other two are 'left-slide' and 'right-slide' from the non-prehensile manipulation category. Our DQN is composed of three fully convolutional networks (FCN) based on the memory-efficient architecture of DenseNet-121 which are trained together without causing any bottleneck situations. Each FCN corresponds to each discrete action and outputs a pixel-wise map of affordances for the relevant action. Rewards are allocated after every forward pass and backpropagation is carried out for weight tuning in the corresponding FCN. In this manner, non-prehensile manipulations are learnt which can, in turn, lead to possible successful prehensile manipulations in the near future and vice versa, thus increasing the efficiency and throughput of the pick-and-place task. The Results section shows performance comparisons of our approach to a baseline deep learning approach and a ResNet architecture-based approach, along with very promising test results at varying clutter densities across a range of complex scenario test cases.

Can’t jump, won’t jump: Affordances of the horse-rider dyad underpin skill adaptation in showjumping using a constraints-led approach

Equestrianism is part of a global industry influenced by a rich history of over 4000 years of culture and tradition. As the only interspecies Olympic event, equestrianism is facing negative public perceptions of competition performance and traditional coaching practices. In this position paper, we propose a constraints-led approach as a framework for contemporising equestrian coaching practice. Ecological dynamics is the theoretical framework that underpins a constraints-led approach methodology, providing guiding principles that inform a nonlinear pedagogy in sport and physical education. A constraints-led approach focuses on the individual (organism/s), task and environmental constraints acting over multiple nested timescales and what this means for how behaviour emerges. Using examples from the equestrian discipline of showjumping, we outline how a constraints-led approach can inform coaching behaviour and practice design to support skill acquisition through co-adaptations in the horse-rider dyad system. By focussing on the horse-rider dyad as a complex system, there is a move away from a human-centric perspective of compliance and control of the horse, toward system agency and intentionality in problem solving. Practice design principles of intention, representativeness, constraints manipulation and functional variability support the dyad to co-adapt and interact effectively through practice to achieve performance goals. Skilful performance is developed through attunement to perceptual information that invites opportunities for action (affordances). Understanding the development of affordance perception in the horse-rider dyad could guide the application of a constraints-led approach to equestrian coaching practice.

Analysis of visual risk perception model for braking control behaviour of human drivers: A literature review

In the interest of driving safety, it is essential to understand driver risk assessment to develop human-centred automated driving systems. Visual perception plays a core role in observing, analysing, and predicting driving crash risks. Furthermore, comprehensive progress of visual perception has been achieved in the development of risk perception metrics. However, it is still of interest to understand driver control behaviours, which depend on visual perception. Therefore, the objective of this literature review is to assess the potential of coupling time-remaining cues for risk perception and braking control behaviour. First, conventional risk perception metrics are classified based on trajectory, contact, and state principles, along with new analysis metrics that have been derived from conventional ones. Then, the analysis metrics are discussed based on visual perception information. Next, driver risk assessment is summarised according to the environment, driver, and object characteristics. Moreover, braking behaviour models are compared in relation to visual perception variables, action affordances, and behaviour dynamics. The current review further discusses the possibility of applying driver behaviour modelling to perception, navigation, and spatial awareness in autonomous vehicles. This human-centred approach has the potential to improve interaction between drivers and automation.

Perceptual Motivation for Action

In this paper we focus on a kind of perceptual states that we call perceptual motivations, that is, perceptual experiences that plausibly motivate us to act, such as itching, perceptual salience and pain. Itching seems to motivate you to scratch, perceiving a stimulus as salient seems to motivate you to attend to it and feeling a pain in your hand seems to motivate actions such as withdrawing from the painful stimulus. Five main accounts of perceptual motivation are available: Descriptive, Conative, Imperativist, Reflexive and Dual Content views. Some of these have been developed in detail and others are natural extensions of existing views. However, we argue that none provides a satisfactory account of the target perceptual states. Driven by the failings of each account, we identify three conditions that any satisfactory theory of perceptual motivation must meet: Direct Motivational Force, Non-Obligatory Force and Intention-Independent Influence. Then we offer an account that attempts to fulfil these conditions: the Affordance Model. This model of perceptual motivation is premised on the claim that each of the target states involves the perception of a specific affordance for action and the triggering of Automatic Motor Initiations (AMIs). We suggest that AMIs can explain the motivational force of these perceptual states.

Investigating the affordances of a flipped mathematics classroom from an activity theoretical perspective

Abstract Flipped Classroom as a pedagogical framework has gained popularity at secondary and tertiary levels of mathematics education, but there is a lack of research based on a solid theoretical foundation. This article considers the flipped mathematics classroom from the perspective of affordances and cultural–historical activity theory. The empirical background is based on semi-structured interview data from eight first-year computer-engineering students following 1 year of flipped classroom teaching. The thematic analysis of the data indicates that the flipped format offers a range of affordances at various levels of the activity system. This article advances research on affordances for mathematical learning in a flipped classroom pedagogical frame, presenting operational affordances out-of-class, action affordances at the mathematical task level and finally activity affordances at the collective level.

Primate tool use and the socio-ecology of thinging: how non-humans think through tools

While ecological psychology and embodied approaches to cognition have gained traction within the literature on non-human primate tool use, a fear of making assumptions on behalf of animal minds means that their application has been conservative, often retaining the methodological individualism of the cognitivist approach. As a result, primate models for technical and cognitive evolution, rooted in the teleological functionalism of the Neo-Darwinist approach, reduce tool use to the unit of the individual, conflating technology with technique and physical cognition with problem-solving computations of energetic efficiency. This article attempts, through the application of material engagement theory, to explore non-human primate technology as a non-individualistic phenomenon in which technique is co-constructed through the ontogenetic development of skill within a dynamic system of structured action affordances and material interactions which constitute an emergent, species-specific mode of technical cognition.

The functional relevance of dorsal motor systems for processing tool nouns– evidence from patients with focal lesions

This study asks whether lesions in different parts of the brain have different effects on the processing of words typically used to refer to objects with and without action affordances, for example tools and animal-related nouns. A cohort of neurological patients with focal lesions participated in a lexical decision paradigm where nouns semantically related to tools, foods and animals were presented along with matched pseudo-words. Differences in semantic features between the categories were confirmed using extensive semantic ratings whereas all semantic word categories were matched for relevant psycholinguistic variables. In a data-driven region of interest analysis, lesions in dorsal pre- and postcentral grey and white matter areas were associated to specific performance deficits for tool nouns when compared to animal nouns. In contrast, patients with lesions primarily affecting perisylvian inferior-frontal and/or temporal regions presented similar deficits across all semantic word categories tested and likewise a group of age and education matched healthy control participants did not show any category specific differences. These findings falsify brain language models denying the fronto-parietal cortex’ role in word recognition and semantic understanding. They are best accounted for by frameworks that acknowledge a role of sensorimotor cortex in the semantic processing of action-related words.

Skilled Embodiment in Emergency Medicine

AbstractThis paper applies a multiscalar interactivity perspective in the study of how healthcare professionals enact skilled embodiment in ways that allow them to animate their rich environment during task performance. However, in focusing on interactivity, we are not only interested in the characteristics of embodiment as they are enacted in the here-and-now. While task performance involves not only the whole body (as a multi-sensory organ), but a historical, skilled body that affects the ecology in which a person is embedded, action-perception must be viewed as direct and distributed. That is, habitual performance and skilled embodiment emerge in coordination with lived experience and real-time affordances for action. Specifically, this paper investigates two real-life cases of how patients and medical staff engage in interactivity through rich embodiment including languaging. From an interactivity perspective, the first case indicates a novice doctor’s inability to pick up relevant information in the emergency medicine ecology. The outcome can be crucial and span patient dissatisfaction, erroneous results, and generally insufficient, and unsatisfactory healthcare. The second case provides a counterexample and illustrates how novice doctors can be supported in picking up task-relevant information as they can rely on other team members’ skilled embodiment. The article concludes that an interactivity perspective has implications not just for model-building in linguistics, semiotics and the cognitive sciences but also for practice where educational initiatives adopt the epistemologies behind such linguistic, communicative and cognitive models.

This is for you: Social modulations of proximal vs. distal space in collaborative interaction

Human spatial representations are shaped by affordances for action offered by the environment. A prototypical example is the organization of space into peripersonal (within reach) and extrapersonal (outside reach) regions, mirrored by proximal (this/here) and distal (that/there) linguistic expressions. The peri-/extrapersonal distinction has been widely investigated in individual contexts, but little is known about how spatial representations are modulated by interaction with other people. Is near/far coding of space dynamically adapted to the position of a partner when space, objects, and action goals are shared? Over two preregistered experiments based on a novel interactive paradigm, we show that, in individual and social contexts involving no direct collaboration, linguistic coding of locations as proximal or distal depends on their distance from the speaker’s hand. In contrast, in the context of collaborative interactions involving turn-taking and role reversal, proximal space is shifted towards the partner, and linguistic coding of near space (‘this’ / ‘here’) is remapped onto the partner’s action space.

An Embodied Agent Learning Affordances With Intrinsic Motivations and Solving Extrinsic Tasks With Attention and One-Step Planning.

We propose an architecture for the open-ended learning and control of embodied agents. The architecture learns action affordances and forward models based on intrinsic motivations and can later use the acquired knowledge to solve extrinsic tasks by decomposing them into sub-tasks, each solved with one-step planning. An affordance is here operationalized as the agent's estimate of the probability of success of an action performed on a given object. The focus of the work is on the overall architecture while single sensorimotor components are simplified. A key element of the architecture is the use of “active vision” that plays two functions, namely to focus on single objects and to factorize visual information into the object appearance and object position. These processes serve both the acquisition and use of object-related affordances, and the decomposition of extrinsic goals (tasks) into multiple sub-goals (sub-tasks). The architecture gives novel contributions on three problems: (a) the learning of affordances based on intrinsic motivations; (b) the use of active vision to decompose complex extrinsic tasks; (c) the possible role of affordances within planning systems endowed with models of the world. The architecture is tested in a simulated stylized 2D scenario in which objects need to be moved or “manipulated” in order to accomplish new desired overall configurations of the objects (extrinsic goals). The results show the utility of using intrinsic motivations to support affordance learning; the utility of active vision to solve composite tasks; and the possible utility of affordances for solving utility-based planning problems.

Affordances for Motor Skill Development in Home, School, and Sport Environments: A Narrative Review

Through development, a child's varied movement contexts provide different opportunities or affordances for action that are fundamental to promoting motor competence. Although home is the primary environment for infants, as children age, school and sport environments gain importance. Studies focusing on affordances for motor behavior in children have mainly addressed the home microsystem, providing an incomplete picture of affordances across different settings, particularly later in development. Here, we undertook a narrative literature review of various affordances for children's motor development. This review revealed that prior studies of school and sports contexts have not specifically focused on those environmental properties that promote or hinder motor learning opportunities, meaning that future research should assess these relationships through manipulations of environmental features in these different microsystems.

Biologically Guided Driver Modeling: the Stop Behavior of Human Car Drivers

This paper presents a principled approach to the modeling of human drivers—applied to stop behavior—by uniting recent ideas in cognitive science and optimal control. With respect to the former, we invoke the affordance competition hypothesis, according to which human behavior is produced by resolving the competition between action affordances that are simultaneously instantiated in response to the environment. From the theory of optimal control, we deploy motor primitives based on minimum jerk as the potential suite of actions. Furthermore, we invoke a layered control architecture, which carries out action priming and action selection sequentially, to model the biological affordance competition process. Motor output may be directed to distinct motor channels, which may be partially inhibited, e.g., to model gas pedal release saturation. Within this architecture, two types of motor units—“deceleration” acting on a gas pedal channel and “brake” acting on a brake pedal channel—are sufficient to model, with remarkable accuracy, the various phases that can be observed in human maneuvers in stopping a car, namely: gas release, gas chocked, brake, and final brake release at stop. The model is validated using experimental data collected in 16 different stop locations, from roundabouts to traffic lights. We also carry out a comparison with the well-known Intelligent Driver Model, discuss the scaling of this framework to more general driving scenarios and finally give an example application where the driver model is used, within a mirroring process, to infer the human driver intentions.

Electrophysiological study of action-affordance priming between object names

If our central representation of an object is defined through embodied experience, we might expect access to action affordances to be privileged over more abstract concepts. We used event-related potentials to examine the relative time course of access to affordances. Written object names were primed with the name of an object sharing the same affordance as the target (e.g. precision-grip: “grape” primed by “tweezers”) or the same taxonomic category (e.g. fruit: “grape” primed by “apple”). N200 latencies, related to go/nogo semantic category decisions on target words, revealed no difference in facilitation provided by affordance and semantic priming. However, separate analyses of ERPs for go and nogo trials showed that semantic priming led to earlier activation during go trials (around 430 ms), and affordance priming led to earlier activation during nogo trials (around 180 ms). While affordances appear to be peripheral to the conceptual representation of objects, they do lead to direct motor preparation.

Action affordances and visuo-spatial complexity in motor imagery: An fMRI study

Imagining a complex action requires not only motor-related processing but also visuo-spatial imagery. In the current study, we examined visuo-spatial complexity and action affordances in motor imagery (MI). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated the neural activity in MI of reach-to-grasp movements of the right hand in five conditions. Thirty participants were scanned while imagining grasping an everyday object, grasping a geometrical shape, grasping next to an everyday object, grasping next to a geometrical shape, and grasping at nothing (no object involved). We found that MI of grasping next to an object recruited the visuo-spatial cognition network including posterior parietal and premotor regions more strongly than MI of grasping an object. This indicates that grasping next to an object requires additional processing resources rendering MI more complex. MI of a grasping movement involving a familiar everyday object compared to a geometrical shape yielded stronger activation in motor-related regions, including the bilateral supplementary motor area. This activation might be due to inhibitory processes preventing motor execution of motor scripts evoked by everyday objects (action affordances). Our results indicate that visuo-spatial cognition plays a significant role in MI.

Affordances and Landscapes: Overcoming the Nature-Culture Dichotomy through Niche Construction Theory.

In this paper we reject the nature–culture dichotomy by means of the idea of affordance or possibility for action, which has important implications for landscape theory. Our hypothesis is that, just as the idea of affordance can serve to overcome the subjective–objective dichotomy, the ideas of landscape and ecological niche, properly defined, would allow us to also transcend the nature–culture dichotomy. First, we introduce an overview of landscape theory, emphasizing processual landscape theory as the most suitable approach for satisfying both cultural and naturalist approaches. After that, we introduce the idea of affordance and we analyze a tension between sociocultural and transcultural affordances (affordances that depend on cultural conventions and affordances that depend on lawful information and bodily aspects of agents). This tension has various implications for landscape theory and ecological niches. Our proposal is that sociocultural and transcultural aspects of affordances could be systematically accommodated if we apply niche construction theory (the theory that explains the process by which organisms modify their selective environments) as a methodological framework for explaining the emergence of ecological niches. This approach will lead us to an integrative account of landscapes as the products of the interaction between human and environmental elements, making it a clear example of a concept that transcends the nature–culture dichotomy.