Scale Matters: Temporality in the Perception of Affordances.
Frontiers in psychology January 1, 2020 Melina Gastelum 14 citations
Affordances—opportunities for action in the environment—should be understood across three different timescales, unifying enactive and ecological approaches to cognition. At the elementary scale, affordances relate to the constantly changing sensorimotor contingencies of embodied assemblies. At the integrative scale, affordances become solicitations that are actualized and constitute an umwelt, with perception structured by the intrinsic temporality of experience. At the narrative scale, affordances operate over developmental time and explain learning, as proposed in Chemero's dynamicist account. These three scales are always intertwined, as learning and perception are ongoing, inseparable processes. The paper argues that considering affordances as synergies—where abilities and environmental aspects constrain system trajectories—helps explain behavior across macro to micro levels.