Definition
An affordance is an action that is suggested or somehow implied to an agent capable of performing that action by an object or situation in the agent’s immediate environment. Thus, a light switch at shoulder height might be said to “afford pushing,” while a cup with a handle in reach might be said to afford grasping by the handle with a certain type of grip. Both of these cases involve artifacts that have a shape and learned associations which are suggestive of the corresponding action, but the word affordance connotes not just that an action is possible by an agent. It also connotes that (a) the action is in some sense actively facilitated by the design of the object or environment that supports it and (b) this facilitation is transparent – it does not involve any deliberate reasoning or cognitive processing by the actor.
An action schemais a representation of a frequently performed, stereotyped, sequence...
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References
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Cooper, R.P. (2012). Learning Action Affordances and Action Schemas. In: Seel, N.M. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1428-6_557
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