Ko and Neuberg’s framework links life-history priorities to ecological affordances but foregrounds conditions of relative stability, thereby underrepresenting volatility. Volatility is a constitutive ecological parameter, altering affordance availability and reliability. Incorporating anticipated affordances, stratified resilience, and volatility as a higher-order constraint sharpens the model’s theoretical scope and ecological validity under conditions of systemic crisis.

This commentary addresses the issue of creativity and the role of materiality in affordance management. We argue that research in ecological psychology and the method of cognitive event analysis can complement Ko and Neuberg’s life span perspective by showing how agents shape material environments to enable unpredictability and creativity when managing their affordance landscape.

We integrated Ko and Neuberg’s proposed framework with the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis to suggest that ancestrally novel dimensions of the environment not only pose their own affordances but may also interact with other environmental dimensions to dynamically alter the affordances they pose. Using hormonal contraceptives as an illustrative example, we delineated several testable predictions that follow from these ideas.

We fully share Ko and Neuberg’s premises and conclusions. We only suggest that the framework could be further clarified by distinguishing two kinds of inputs: regulatory variables (cues that calibrate motivational salience) and affordances (local action possibilities that matter only once a motivation is already engaged).

Tracking the emergence, use, and transformation of affordances across the life course requires a sophisticated evolutionary model of development. I argue that the proposed distinction between “childhood,” “mating,” and “parenting” stages suffers from important limitations and should be replaced by a finer-grained taxonomy in which stages are not identified with specific overarching goals. I also suggest that obligate life stages may be usefully distinguished from facultative, reversible life phases.

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.

This commentary extends Ko and Neuberg’s theoretical framework by incorporating two underexplored but developmentally critical ecological conditions of environments: digital social and outdoor natural environments. Applying life history and affordance management perspectives, it examines how these environments can be perceived as opportunities and threats across childhood, mating, and parenting stages. Incorporating these ecologies enhances the framework’s theoretical scope and relevance to modern developmental realities.

Ko and Neuberg’s affordance-management framework represents an important top-down approach to understanding how distal environments shape human psychology through evolutionarily recurrent problems. We contrast this evolutionary approach with the bottom-up socio-ecological approach, which focuses on current environmental arrangements, highlighting their complementary research strategies for understanding ecology–mind interactions.

We are pleased to see the concept of affordances being given attention in the context of evolutionary theory. We are, however, surprised that the authors engage so little with existing work on affordances. We highlight some properties of affordances that the authors overlook: affordances are perceivable, are ubiquitous across the animal kingdom, are relative to individuals, and can be learned.

We briefly introduce the science of behavior analysis and the extent to which it overlaps with the model of ecological affordances described by Ko and Neuberg. Although we largely agree with the description of human-environment interactions offered by the affordance-management framework, we aim to refine the author’s discussion of goal seeking to avoid circular reasoning and afford validation through experimentation.

This study critiques Ko and Neuberg’s affordance management framework from Asian and African perspectives. We argue that intergenerational knowledge, collective selfhood, and culturally situated ecologies must all be considered in any life-stage affordance model. In particular, we identify community values, sacred relationships with land, and postcolonial legacies as influencing how affordance is viewed over the course of a person’s life.

Integrating affordance-management and life-history perspectives, we propose that the perception of ecological affordances—the opportunities and threats an environment poses for goal achievement—varies as people’s goal priorities change across developmental life stages. The same environment can be perceived as posing an opportunity at one life stage, but as posing a threat or being irrelevant at other stages, shifting how individuals manage these affordances. By examining environmental dimensions tied to recurring adaptive challenges in human history—genetic relatedness, physical violence, and sex-age ratio—we explore human-environment interactions across the lifespan, offering insights into lifelong flexibility in ecological navigation.

The broad range of commentaries addressed central debates in the origins, nature, and development of relationship knowledge. These debates mirror those that have played out in other domains: do infants possess innate, abstract primitives for representing relationships? Or is their understanding primarily the result of learning? Should we consider infants’ behavior in experiments a reflection of abstract cognitive concepts or as reflexes or embodied knowledge? The commentaries also raise questions about other possible cognitive primitives as well as the evolutionary roots of such knowledge. What is the result of statistical learning, and what are inductive biases? Ultimately, these commentaries examine how innate representations of relationships may facilitate the resolution of other learning challenges, including the acquisition of cultural norms, institutional roles, group dynamics, and moral principles. Ultimately, I argue that advancing our understanding will require integrative approaches drawing on developmental, comparative, computational, and cultural research. This exchange clarifies many pressing empirical puzzles, setting the stage for a research program that I hope others across disciplines and theoretical standpoints will join in.

Thomas suggests that evidence suggestive of an innate moral core can instead be explained by relationship inferences and evaluations. We argue that the analogy between other demonstrations of prosociality (e.g., helping) and imitation is insufficient, and additionally highlight key findings that appear inconsistent with a relationship-centric view of infants’ sociomoral capacities.

Cognitive scientists have long investigated infants’ abilities to reason about others’ minds. Here, we identify a limitation to research on early mental state reasoning: that this research has mostly challenged infants to reason about the minds of strangers. In this commentary, we call on cognitive scientists to consider the role of social relationships when studying mental state reasoning and cognition more broadly.

Thomas proposes that infants classify social relationships using the categories of Relational Models Theory. Attachment theory and research describe an innate, early-emerging suite of psychological processes by which infants identify and bond selectively to caregivers. Classification of others’ relationships might build upon these same mechanisms, with implications for future research on social cognition across development.

Understanding innate core cognition for social relations as a deep, generative social grammar that helps solve the learnability problem of discovering who relates to whom in what ways “amounts to asking how human social life is understandable, and hence possible” (Thomsen & Carey, 2013, p.17). Expanding the focus beyond enduring interpersonal relationships allows us to understand how social and societal meaning (e.g., in ideology) reflect fundamental forms of relational coordination ultimately grounded in cross-species affordances.

Thomas proposes that two basic computations determine how infants represent social relationships: categorizing the connection by model and computing its strength. I argue that the concept of relational strength is ill-defined, its empirical evidence in early development unconvincing, and its putative operations better explained as categorical inferences about narrow relational schemas (e.g., caregiving).

Navigating the social world requires representing how people relate to one another and how people are connected in a network. Though both are forms of relational knowledge, it is difficult to unify them in a single theoretical framework. I hypothesize that the statistics of observation may be sufficient to learn both network structure and an intuitive theory of relationships.

In this commentary, we express enthusiasm for Thomas’s article and research efforts, but question her proposed division between social groups and social relationships. Joining other social scientists, we view relationships as fundamental to – and sometimes synonymous with – social groups. Further, empirical studies focused on infants and young children highlight the tight link between social groups and relationships.