Constraints on Possibility: 3 Cognitive Constraints — Shaping the Landscape of Possibility

Beyond material conditions, the cognitive capacities of agents play a decisive role in determining which possibilities are noticed, pursued, and enacted. Attention, memory, perception, and habitual patterns structure the field of potential, selectively enabling some pathways while suppressing others. Constraints are therefore not simply restrictive, but relational modulators of emergent possibilities.

Attention as Selective Coupling

Attention functions as a relational aperture, orienting awareness toward certain stimuli and away from others. What enters the field of consciousness is shaped by attentional capacity, prior knowledge, and contextual relevance. By prioritising certain potentials, attention filters the landscape of possibility, allowing some patterns to consolidate while others remain latent.

Memory and Temporal Thickness

Memory imposes temporal constraints on cognition, linking past experiences with present action. It shapes expectations, informs anticipation, and influences decision-making, producing continuities and sedimentations in the field of possibility. Cognitive limits in memory capacity also define which patterns can be held, integrated, or projected into future scenarios.

Perception and Pattern Recognition

Perception is inherently selective, constrained by sensory modalities and interpretive frameworks. It enables pattern detection and relational mapping, but also imposes boundaries on what can be sensed or conceptualised. In this way, cognitive constraints both guide and delimit the recognition of emergent opportunities within relational fields.

Habit, Skill, and Procedural Constraints

Habits and skills compress potential by stabilising recurrent patterns of thought and action. While they allow efficient navigation of complex environments, they also narrow the horizon of possibility, favouring established pathways over novel configurations. Habitual structures illustrate the dual role of cognitive constraints: stabilising effective patterns while potentially restricting innovation.

Cognitive Constraints as Generative Forces

Importantly, cognitive constraints are not merely limitations. By structuring attention, memory, perception, and habit, they create coherent landscapes in which emergent potentials can be explored. Constraints focus the field, enabling adaptive exploration and the selective actualisation of possibilities. In this sense, limitation and generativity are inseparable in cognitive systems.

Implications for Relational Possibility

Cognitive constraints reveal that the emergence of potential is not only materially grounded but also experientially modulated. Possibility is filtered, scaffolded, and amplified by the architecture of mind and attention, showing that the horizon of potential is always co-constituted by both material and cognitive relational structures.

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Modulatory voices:

• Daniel Kahneman: cognitive heuristics as structural limits on attention and reasoning.

• George Lakoff & Mark Johnson: embodied cognition shaping conceptual possibility.

• James Gibson: perception as a relational mapping of affordances.