Successful coordination of prehensile action depends upon the selection and control of appropriate reach and grasp movements. This thesis explores how prehensile actions are shaped and regulated by perceptual information. According to ecological psychology, behaviour is achieved through the detection of information specifying the opportunities the environment affords for action. A review of the literature identified that as this information evolves over time, a comprehensive understanding of prehension has to consider how affordance perception and continual guidance of action come together in the pursuit of goal-directed action. In a series of interlinking studies the initiation, hand transport and grasp components of prehension were investigated in order to determine how affordances are manifested in the emergence of, and guidance within, prehensile actions. Study 1 explored the effect of information specifying affordances on the time taken to initiate and perform a ball-posting action. Results indicated that affordance perception was reflected in initiation time, whilst affordance actualisation was reflected in movement time, demonstrating that effects of affordance perception extend beyond action preparation to directly influence the emergence of action. Study 2 investigated the selection and regulation of perceptual information during the guidance of hand transport. General tau theory (Lee, 1998) was applied to test i) whether the ratio of coupling between hand and object motion is held constant throughout the reach, and ii) whether this ratio, k, describes the kinematics of handobject contact under varying spatiotemporal task constraints. Results indicated a constant tau ratio during the middle, but not the end phase of the movement; moreover, although the summary ratio k was not sensitive to task manipulations, the time-dependent counterpart, K(t), did exhibit effects of task constraints. This indicates that the guidance of hand transport was a continuous process, where, dependent upon the task goals, the regulation of perceptual information changed throughout the action. The final study, Study 3, examined digit coordination during the grasp. Focusing on the transition from 2-digit to 3-digit grip configurations, the study addressed whether grip selection is made before or during the action. Results showed the transition between 2- and 3-digit grips occurs at a within trial level. The grip configuration utilised could only be distinguished as 2- or 3-digit during the second half of the movement, indicating that grip selection emerges online during the unfolding action. Together these studies provide evidence of continual guidance of prehensile actions and offer support for the consideration of prehensile action as a set of nested task goals. It was concluded that affordance perception and movement guidance are interrelated and evolve continuously throughout the unfolding prehensile action. In light of these findings, issues relating to action selection emerging online from the organism-environment interaction are discussed.

Design constraints is the first topic new interaction designers learn about intheir studies. These are supposed to be the properties of a design that limitsuser’s actions. This thesis aims to explore these constraints in depth tounderstand if there is more to learn about them when placed in a new setting,such as games. This knowledge could then be used to create better player oruser experience. To discover this, a detailed study of two escape rooms wasconducted and analyzed.The investigation showed that there is more to design constraints thanpreviously mentioned by theorists, especially when context changes, and thatdesign constraints should instead be interaction opportunities. Instead ofonly seeing constraints as limiting actions, they should become the clues forpossible interactions.

This dissertation was performed with the aim of understanding more about how people interact with and deceive one another in an online context. To build that understanding, the study was motivated by five research questions: (1) How do users experience the process of misrepresenting themselves to others? (2) How do users present themselves in online contexts in which they may not feel comfortable with portraying themselves fully? (3) How do perceived norms and expectations within groups inform users’ self-presentations? (4) How do users’ perceptions of who will view their information impact self-representation? (5) How do perceived affordances impact how users feel they can engage in deceptive practices? To explore and answer these questions, 27 interviews were conducted via the social networking platform Discord with members of the r/Fantasy server. The findings from the research show that how users perceive the potential audiences they have in a group setting is impacted by what they perceive the affordances of the platform to be. In turn, these perceptions influence what users care to share about themselves and how and if they engage in deceptive practices with other group members, both of which are also motivated by a desire to fit in and be accepted by the group at large. These findings provide insight into how users interact with and deceive one another, but also open up room for future research into the intersection of affordances and audiences and how users modify how they present themselves in relation to those perceived components of the online experience.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / There is general recognition regarding the importance of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses in assisting students acquire academic discourses appropriate to specific disciplines of study. However, undergraduate students in multilingual contexts, where English is a second or foreign language face challenges in managing the transition from secondary school into the university, where they are expected to appropriate as well as acclimate to new discourses of communication deemed to be essential for their survival in the academic world. Although studies show the importance of agency in language learning success, institutional demands have sometimes led to the adoption of teaching and assessment practices that ignore the learners’ English language learning history, background, experiences and needs, which impact on their sense of agency and voice in the EAP classroom and eventually their learning success.

Few studies address the question of the technology-based instructional methods of visual patterns, so the overarching purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of three treatments on pattern recognition. Specifically, with a pretest-posttest control group experimental study, the effectiveness of three instructional strategies, a flicker treatment, a no-flicker treatment, and a comparison treatment, (groups respectively analyzing sequential displays of two similar images with and without a blank screen in between and simultaneous displays of two images), was compared based on recognition (memory) and classification (transfer) test scores. The group differences in learning effectiveness and efficiency were also measured by study duration, the number of incorrect responses and the number of trials. Pretest scores were taken as a covariate to equate the groups' prior knowledge. College students (n=228) recruited from the liberal arts, science, and engineering programs in a Southeast university of the United States were randomly assigned to one of the three treatments. Their immediate learning was assessed with validated tests of recognition and classification, and their study time and response accuracy was tracked. All of the three groups learned and gained approximately an 80% accuracy rate in both posttests. An overall statistically significant difference was identified among the groups. In the classification test, both the flicker and comparison groups performed significantly better than the no-flicker group with small effect sizes. However, there were no significant differences among the groups in the recognition test. Moreover, the three groups demonstrated statistically significant differences in duration, number of incorrect responses, and number of trials. The study results are consistent with generative learning and related theories and evidence. Outcome measures inform practitioners of potential effective methods and a validated instructional system while effect sizes indicate relatively small advantages at relatively high cost.

Since YouTube's launch in 2005, it has grown into one of the most visited social media platforms in the world. It launched with the slogan "Broadcast Yourself"with the promise that the content sharing site would allow anyone to post, share, and interact with videos from anyone around the world for free. Many people took advantage of that promise and became Internet celebrities, or "influencers,"in a short amount of time, amassing millions of subscribers and billions of views. The success of these YouTube stars has led them to land roles on TV and in films, launch music careers, write books, and many other avenues. However, these stars have also had their fair share of public controversies that have caused advertisers to pull their content from YouTube's platform. This has forced YouTube to change their algorithm and other procedures so that YouTube stars' videos are no longer boosted to the front page, which in turn hurts their budding careers. This puts YouTube at a crossroads between billions of dollars in advertising revenue and the homegrown celebrities that helped make YouTube what it is today. The research in this study examined what YouTube influencers value and would change about YouTube's affordances to help make the website a better opportunity for anyone and everyone to grow their Internet careers. Using qualitative methods to gain insights from several YouTube influencers, this study explored what YouTube and other future social media accounts can do to help those that know and utilize their platforms best. The findings of this study show that while social media oftentimes acts as a conduit for online content sharing, YouTube doubles as an investor who will back videos with advertising revenue, front-page access, and algorithmic preference to boost a video's success and reach. This venture capital-style system comes with challenges as influencers can both benefit greatly from these affordances, but also be hurt when these affordances block their videos from finding audiences. Because of this, money-making on YouTube can be highly rewarding, but also discouraging and risky. Influencers are often stuck finding other ways to make money such as external sponsorship, platform diversification, and independent merchandising. This puts YouTube and influencers in a constant state of renegotiation where YouTube toes the line of pleasing advertisers and influencers while influencers struggle to work around YouTube affordances, policies, and terms. These findings show that YouTube is a rich, immersive medium with significant potential for influencers. The findings also show that affordances, while often viewed as beneficial to all parties, may at times be beneficial and detrimental depending on the individual. Future research can build off the foundation this study lays to learn if this model exists on other platforms and media.

The ability to infer and mediate intentions has been recognized as a crucial task in recent robotics research, where it is agreed that robots are required to be equipped with intentional mechanisms in order to participate in collaborative tasks with humans. Reasoning about - or rather, perceiving - intentions enables robots to infer what other agents are doing, to communicate what are their plans, or to take proactive decisions. Intent recognition relates to several system requirements, such as the need of an enhanced collaboration mechanism in human-machine interactions, the need for adversarial technology in competitive scenarios, ambient intelligence, or predictive security systems. When attempting to describe what an intention is, agreement exists to represent it as a plan together with the goal it attempts to achieve. Being compatible with computer science concepts, this representation enables to handle intentions with methodologies based on planning, such as the Planning Domain Description Language or Hierarchical Task Networks. In this licentiate we describe how intentions can be processed using classical planning methods, with an eye also on newer technologies such as deep networks. Our goal is to study and define computational models that would allow robotic agents to infer, construct and mediate intentions. Additionally, we explore how intentions in the form of abstract plans can be grounded to sensorial data, and in particular we provide discussion on grounding over speech utterances and affordances, that correspond to the action possibilities offered by an environment.

Since YouTube's launch in 2005, it has grown into one of the most visited social media platforms in the world. It launched with the slogan "Broadcast Yourself" with the promise that the content sharing site would allow anyone to post, share, and interact with videos from anyone around the world for free. Many people took advantage of that promise and became Internet celebrities, or "influencers," in a short amount of time, amassing millions of subscribers and billions of views. The success of these YouTube stars has led them to land roles on TV and in films, launch music careers, write books, and many other avenues. However, these stars have also had their fair share of public controversies that have caused advertisers to pull their content from YouTube's platform. This has forced YouTube to change their algorithm and other procedures so that YouTube stars' videos are no longer boosted to the front page, which in turn hurts their budding careers. This puts YouTube at a crossroads between billions of dollars in advertising revenue and the homegrown celebrities that helped make YouTube what it is today. The research in this study examined what YouTube influencers value and would change about YouTube's affordances to help make the website a better opportunity for anyone and everyone to grow their Internet careers. Using qualitative methods to gain insights from several YouTube influencers, this study explored what YouTube and other future social media accounts can do to help those that know and utilize their platforms best. The findings of this study show that while social media oftentimes acts as a conduit for online content sharing, YouTube doubles as an investor who will back videos with advertising revenue, front-page access, and algorithmic preference to boost a video's success and reach. This venture capital-style system comes with challenges as influencers can both benefit greatly from these affordances, but also be hurt when these affordances block their videos from finding audiences. Because of this, money-making on YouTube can be highly rewarding, but also discouraging and risky. Influencers are often stuck finding other ways to make money such as external sponsorship, platform diversification, and independent merchandising. This puts YouTube and influencers in a constant state of renegotiation where YouTube toes the line of pleasing advertisers and influencers while influencers struggle to work around YouTube affordances, policies, and terms. These findings show that YouTube is a rich, immersive medium with significant potential for influencers. The findings also show that affordances, while often viewed as beneficial to all parties, may at times be beneficial and detrimental depending on the individual. Future research can build off the foundation this study lays to learn if this model exists on other platforms and media.

abstract: In 2016, the United Nations reported a historical high of 65.6 million globally displaced people. Within the current protectionist and isolationist climate, the U.S is accepting a fewer number of refugees for resettlement than ever before and less governmental funding is being allocated to resettlement organizations, which provide support services for refugee resettlement and integration. Increased migration and the advancement of communication technologies with affordable access to these technologies have produced extensive communication networks and complex relational ties across the globe. While this is certainly true of all migrants, building and maintaining relational ties has added complexity for refugees whose journey to resettlement, economic insecurity, political disenfranchisement, and vulnerability impact the motivating factors for digital engagement. This dissertation seeks to understand to what extent Diminescu’s (2008) concept of the connected migrant addresses the lived experience of resettled refugees in Phoenix, Arizona. The connected migrant through Information Communication Technology (ICT) use maintains transnational and local networks that produce mobility and belonging. Connected migrants are able to produce and maintain socio-technical sociality abroad and in the country of settlement to create and access social capital and resources. Using a grounded theory approach and qualitative methods, this research project explores concepts of mobility, connectivity, and belonging in relation to resettled refugees. The research indicates that age, imagined affordances, digital literacy, language, and time moderate connectivity, belonging, and mobility for resettled refugees. Finally, I offer the concept of transnational contextual relationality to understand refugee communication strategies with the transnational and local network. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Communication Studies 2019

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