Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Affordances offer AI research an alternative from representations for linking perception to action in autonomous systems. Affordances are based in the informational structure of the environment and the somatic capacities of the agent and arise in their interaction. AI implementations of affordance perception typically utilize relatively basic, natural affordances such as the graspability of a handle. Culturally- scaffolded affordances, such as the letter-mailing capacity of a postbox, pose a more intractable problem for affordance- based robotics. This class of affordances requires acculturation and is highly culture-specific. AI implementations of affordance perception typically bypass this difficulty by making recourse to representations. I begin by reviewing affordance perception and the difference between natural and cultural affordances. I then critically discuss implementations of cultural affordance perception in autonomous agents. Finally, I argue that AI affordance perception does not require a robust representationalism in order to implement cultural affordances.