Ko and Neuberg present a valuable framework for understanding how environmental affordances are managed as goals shift across life stages. Their account rightly emphasizes that the extended period of childhood in humans presents a unique evolutionary opportunity for the development of critical, higher-order social and cognitive skills. When describing the goals of early childhood, Ko and Neuberg specifically focus on the ways in which children monitor the makeup of their social world, with goals of identifying kin relations, avoiding or mitigating physical violence, and identifying alloparenting opportunities in environments that vary in sex ratio. Nevertheless, we suggest that the evolutionary benefits of children’s evaluation of the affordances of their social world extend far beyond these factors and are much more nuanced.

The view of learning as an interaction between the learner and the environment is especially compelling in environments in which the structure is relatively stable and cues are interpretable and transparent. For example, as Ko and Neuberg note, a kin-rich environment affords safety and support for a newborn, restricts mating opportunities for an adolescent, and offers cooperative childcare for a parent. This progression of affordances illustrates how the meaning of an environment can shift as one’s goals evolve throughout the life span.

However, many contemporary environments are neither stable nor easily read. Physical and social systems are often characterized by ambiguous cues, hidden structure, and delayed outcomes. In such cases, individuals not only face the challenge of aligning their strategies to their goals but also of constructing adequate representations of the causal systems they inhabit. And representations of causal systems have consequences. Given ambiguous environmental cues, perceived affordances between the ecological system and the individual can be misguided from the outset. For example, consider the challenge of accurately interpreting the affordances of the changing climate. Individual behaviors, such as driving a car or adjusting a thermostat, have effects that are distributed across vast space and time, and often are invisible in everyday experience. In such cases, people may miscalibrate their behavioral strategies because the structure of the system is unclear and supports alternative representations with contrasting consequences (Kim & Coley, Reference Kim and Coley2025). Instead, they rely on accessible but misleading cues: warm or cold days can temporarily shift climate beliefs (“local warming” effects), and different labels – climate change versus global warming – can alter judgments of seriousness depending on ideological commitments (Weber, Reference Weber2016). The opportunities and threats that people recognize depend heavily on their construal of the climate system, and that construal itself is often fragile and incomplete. As a result, learning from kin and adjusting strategies based on the environment may not protect an individual from acquiring inaccurate – and potentially evolutionarily costly – information.

One implication of such complex representational challenges is that affordances will often depend heavily on the reciprocal interaction between environmental features, the child’s individual priorities, and the guidance in instruction of those trusted individuals who interact with the child. Missing from Ko and Neuberg’s discussion is how affordances are impacted by the child’s “developmental niche” (e.g., Super & Harkness, Reference Super and Harkness1986), which describes how developmental goals are themselves shaped by caregivers’ (whether genetically-related parents or non-genetically-related alloparents) cultural expectations and ethnotheories about how the child should be learning from and interacting with the environment. These cultural factors influence the makeup and stability of both the physical and social environments in which children develop. Ko and Neuberg’s theory would benefit from engaging with such cultural aspects of early development when learning is intimately guided by trusted social interaction.

Managing affordances within the developmental niche requires not only aligning action with priorities, but also constructing accurate, socially mediated representations of what the environment affords in the first place. In this way, we propose extending the model by considering the mechanisms through which children make decisions about who to learn from and what to trust. Across the lifespan, individuals must often learn to construct mental models of systems they cannot observe directly (Harris et al., Reference Harris, Koenig, Corriveau and Jaswal2018). Under these situations, individuals must learn from the information provided by others, which requires trusting that the information provided is accurate and the information-giver has trustworthy intentions (Harris & Corriveau, Reference Harris, Corriveau, Robinson and Einav2014; Richert & Corriveau, Reference Richert and Corriveau2022). Importantly, research from both developmental and evolutionary psychology indicates that although learners do prefer to learn from members of their social group over a member of an outgroup, proximity alone does not guarantee access to reliable information (Kendal et al., Reference Kendal, Boogert, Rendell, Laland, Webster and Jones2018; Chen, Corriveau, & Harris, Reference Chen, Corriveau and Harris2013). Moreover, such preferences vary by developmental niche: for example, preferential trust in learning from authoritative individuals varies widely both within and across cultures (Bernard et al., Reference Bernard, Castelain, Mercier, Kaufmann, Van der Henst and Clément2016; Ma et al., Reference Ma, Cui, Wan, Chen and Corriveau2024, Reference Ma, Cui, Suarez, Chen and Corriveau2025). In this way, we agree with Ko and Neuberg that affordance management is shaped by shifting goals. By extending their model and treating representational inference as an innately social process and a core developmental challenge, Ko and Neuberg could more fully and accurately account for how individuals navigate environments in which affordance management depends on whom they trust, what information they receive, and how accurately they construe the systems they inhabit.