Ko and Neuberg convincingly show that human behavior is guided by affordances that shift across life stages. What their account misses, however, is the messy, contingent, and often surprising character of affordance management in concrete settings. From the ground level, what looks like smooth developmental trajectories becomes a constant negotiation with material surroundings, tools, and bodies. It is here, in the micro-dynamics of perception and action, that creativity and unpredictability enter the picture – dimensions that a bird’s-eye account risks flattening.

Embodied interactions with and in complex cultural and material ecologies are key for different kinds of cultural practices (e.g., Goodwin, Reference Goodwin1994; Grasseni, Reference Grasseni2004; Rietveld & Brouwers, Reference Rietveld and Brouwers2017; Tribble, Reference Tribble2011). The ecological affordances discussed by Ko and Neuberg, such as levels of violence, sex-age ratio, and genetic relatedness, are different from those studied in such research. Yet, the management of affordances in these specific settings and practices follows similar general dynamics as those discussed by Ko and Neuberg as the interaction of skilled agents with different kinds of affordances is profoundly shaped by their previous experiences and expertise.

Taking a closer look at concrete and skillful navigation of the affordance landscape serves to highlight the interactive aspect of this engagement (Rietveld & Kiverstein, Reference Rietveld and Kiverstein2014). By interactive, we mean the way agents change their environment in different ways, and how they, in turn, are changed by this environment, in fast and highly responsive feedback loops. These kinds of interactions are, most of the time, highly embodied and dependent on the material environment. From the perspective of different life stages, this interactive, embodied, and material aspect is easy to miss. Yet, it is important to highlight this, we believe, since it expands macro-level accounts with an important space for creativity and unpredictability that enables a more open-ended model of human development than Ko and Neuberg implicitly seem to suggest.

In ecological psychology (Chemero, Reference Chemero2009; Gibson, Reference Gibson1979; Rietveld, Denys & Van Westen, Reference Rietveld, Denys, Van Westen, Newen, De Bruin and Gallagher2018), the interaction between agent and surroundings is studied in embodied and nonrepresentational terms. Agents act on the basis of their embodied attunement to the affordances of the environment (Pezzulo & Cisek, Reference Pezzulo and Cisek2016). The method of cognitive event analysis has been used to understand this interaction (Trasmundi & Steffensen, Reference Trasmundi and Steffensen2016; Steffensen, Vallée-Tourangeau & Vallée-Tourangeau, Reference Steffensen, Vallée-Tourangeau and Vallée-Tourangeau2016), by using close analysis of video recordings and interviews. With this method, researchers can trace the embodied decision-making process with a very high level of detail, studying how bodily interaction with different kinds of material, social, and technical ecologies reveals the embodied cognitive processes that are in play (Trasmundi, Reference Trasmundi2020).

We believe that ecological psychology and cognitive event analysis can be used in different ways to complement research on affordance management over the life span. Here, however, we find it useful to zoom in on the material aspects of these processes and how these relate to creativity.

In a recent study of matchstick puzzles, Vallée-Tourangeau (Reference Vallée-Tourangeau2025) shows that participants often arrive at solutions not through abstract mental representations but by physically manipulating the sticks. Crucially, the material interaction did not merely augment cognition but sometimes produced the solution: new configurations revealed answers that were not evident in advance. Vallée-Tourangeau calls this phenomenon “outsight,” where playful or exploratory actions generate cues and prototypes that open a path forward. This is much more unpredictable than Ko and Neuberg’s account, as the material is not just flexible with regard to the agent interacting with it but provides an important source for agential push from within the interaction. This is not to say that objects have agency, but that human agents might shape their material environments in such ways so that these environments can yield creative outcomes that were not there in advance.

This kind of “outsight” is not limited to puzzles. In our own exploratory study of creative cognition, we followed the comic author, Anders Kvammen at work (Haraldsen & Trasmundi, Reference Haraldsen and Trasmundi2025). Using cognitive event analysis, we traced how his interaction with pen and page created shifting affordances that revealed new creative possibilities. When facing a difficult problem in his comic making, Kvammen often reoriented by reshaping the page layout, thereby producing a fresh set of affordances that guided the next step. Just as with matchsticks, the material setup itself generated creative options, highlighting how embodied agents can reorganize their environments to discover new solutions. This kind of high granularity analysis of a creative process, which tracks how agents shape their own affordance landscape to enable new creative possibilities, grants insights into a kind of ecological affordance management in which material surroundings, skills, and the personal goals of the agent interact in a fluid and highly responsive feedback loop. The available affordances in creative and culturally situated activities are not just the result of different life stages but can provide an important material impetus that enables new cognitive options that were not available outside these interactions.

In conclusion, the affordance management that is traceable through ecological psychology and cognitive event analysis provides a way into understanding creativity and material surroundings as a source for opening up new paths in the affordance landscape, providing an important space for unpredictability in the affordance management of humans.