Managing affordances in a complex world depends on social and cultural factors

Ko and Neuberg present a valuable framework for understanding how environmental affordances are managed as goals shift across life stages. We review research highlighting the importance of not only the individual's shifting relation to the environment but also the level of opacity of the to-be-learned information and the reciprocal social and cultural interaction between the learner and the teacher as well. We argue that focusing on these social and cultural aspects of development is critical to understanding such ecological affordances.