Cultural Affordances: Scaffolding Local Worlds Through Shared Intentionality and Regimes of Attention

TLDR

The paper proposes a framework to study how cultural affordances engage human agents, aiming to understand how culture and context shape behavior, cognition, and experience through integrated embodied, cognitive, and affective approaches. The framework integrates cognitive, social, and affective science to model how basic mental processes acquire cultural content through immersive participation, joint attention, and shared intentionality. It shows that cultural content and norms arise from basic mental processes that gain meaning via immersive social participation, joint attention, and shared intentionality.

Abstract

In this paper we outline a framework for the study of the mechanisms involved in the engagement of human agents with cultural affordances. Our aim is to better understand how culture and context interact with human biology to shape human behavior, cognition, and experience. We attempt to integrate several related approaches in the study of the embodied, cognitive, and affective substrates of sociality and culture and the sociocultural scaffolding of experience. The integrative framework we propose bridges cognitive and social sciences to provide (i) an expanded concept of 'affordance' that extends to sociocultural forms of life, and (ii) a multilevel account of the socioculturally scaffolded forms of affordance learning and the transmission of affordances in patterned sociocultural practices and regimes of shared attention. This framework provides an account of how cultural content and normative practices are built on a foundation of contentless basic mental processes that acquire content through immersive participation of the agent in social practices that regulate joint attention and shared intentionality.