The Sense of Possibility: The Cognitive Ecology of Experience: 3 Perception and Affordance — Encountering the Possible

Attention opens the aperture of experience; perception moves through that aperture, translating potential into enacted relevance. In a relational field, perception is not a passive reception of sensory data but an active negotiation between organism, environment, and emergent affordances — the relational invitations that the world offers for action. Each perceptual moment is a co-individuation of perceiver and perceived, an encounter in which potential and actuality interweave.

Perception as Relational Activity

Classical cognitive frameworks often treat perception as a computational mapping of external stimuli. In contrast, a relational account situates perception as activity within a field of potential. To perceive is to enact distinctions that did not preexist the act; it is a modulation of the field that resolves some potentials into perceptible form while leaving others latent. Perception is thus both selective and generative: it foregrounds certain possibilities and, in doing so, creates the conditions for further exploration.

Affordances and the Ecology of Action

James Gibson’s notion of affordances exemplifies this relational dynamic. Affordances are neither solely properties of the environment nor intrinsic to the organism; they exist in the coupling between the two. The world is a landscape of potential engagements, each perceptible through the system’s attunement. Perception reveals affordances — actionable possibilities — and in responding to them, the perceiver alters the topology of the field. Every interaction is a local actualisation, yet it leaves countless potentials unactualised, maintaining the field’s openness.

Modulation by Affect and Attention

Perception is inseparable from attention and affect. Attention structures the aperture through which affordances become salient, while affect tunes the gradients of relevance, highlighting some potentials over others. Fear, curiosity, desire, or delight do not simply colour experience; they shape the perceptual field itself, biasing which affordances are noticed, engaged with, or ignored. In this sense, perception is a dynamic triad of sensing, valuing, and attending within a relational ecology.

Symbolic and Collective Mediation

Perception is also semiotically mediated. Language, cultural conventions, and shared symbolic structures guide the detection and interpretation of affordances. Collective cognition enables groups to coordinate perceptual attention, stabilising shared worlds of significance. Divergences in perception, therefore, reveal not only individual differences but alternative construals of potential within a social and symbolic ecology.

Perception as Gateway to Possibility

Through the relational negotiation of affordances, perception generates the immediate horizon of actionable possibilities. It is the gateway through which potential enters into the field of actualisation. In doing so, perception maintains a tension between novelty and continuity, stabilising some pathways while leaving others unactualised, preserving the openness of the experiential field.

---

Modulatory voices:

• James Gibson: affordances as relational invitations to action.

• Merleau-Ponty: perception as embodied engagement with the world.

• Varela, Thompson, & Rosch: enactive cognition as co-emergence of agent and environment.

---

The next post, “Memory and Temporal Depth,” will examine how the field of perception is interwoven with past experience, shaping the continuity and thickness of potential across time.