Beyond grasping - perceiving affordances across various stages of cognitive development

The concept of “affordance” has typically represented the relationship between human perceivers and their environment. Affordance perception, representation, and inference are central to commonsense reasoning, tool-use and creative problem-solving in artificial agents. Existing approaches to representing affordances have focused on its physical aspects, relying on either static ontologies or statistical formalisms to extract relationships between physical features of objects, actions and the corresponding effects of their interaction. These approaches fail to provide flexibility with which to reason about affordances through various developmental stages, where they are more influenced by changing context, social norms, historical precedence, and uncertainty. We develop a formal rules-based logical representational format coupled with an uncertainty-processing framework to reason about cognitive affordances in a more general manner than shown in the existing literature. Our framework, which is retained through cognitive development, allows agents to make deductive and abductive inferences about functional and social affordances. We demonstrate our approach with an example, and show that an agent can successfully reason through situations that involve a tight interplay between various social and functional norms.