Ko and Neuberg call for integrating the concept of “affordance” into developmental science. That move is timely and relevant, because it can redirect explanation from trait possesion to organism–environment interdependence across life stages. Following Gibson (Reference Gibson1979/2015), an affordance is an opportunity for action specified by the environment relative to an organism’s species-specific features and abilities. Importantly, affordances must be detected to be acted upon. Stoffregen (Reference Stoffregen and Jones2003) adds that affordances are emergent properties of organism–environment reciprocal coupling (attunement). This notion encompasses not only a whether-to-perform rule but also the when and how aspects that shape behavioral expression (Blau & Wagman, Reference Blau and Wagman2022). Taking affordances seriously entails commitment to certain epistemological assumptions constituting the framework from which this term stems. Invoking the concept outside that theoretical system risks undermining both its coherence and its explanatory power.

The target article notes that goals shape affordance perception and, as goal prioritization shifts across the life course, perceived affordances shift accordingly – yielding a goal-led framework. On an ecological approach, lawfully structured perceptual information guides goal-directed activity, which emerges from a continually unfolding coordination among goals, bodily constraints, and generic physical principles in the environment. Bodily activity changes moment to moment as subjective experiences shift in the course of achieving a goal; behavior – be it sitting, producing speech, or avoiding rain – is self-correcting and goal-preserving (Blau & Wagman, Reference Blau and Wagman2022). With a few exceptions in which physical features (e.g., children’s strength) are taken into account, the target article focuses on how goal shifts lead to behavioral change, with affordances being merely an intermediate, disposable accessory.

Although the article does not self-identify with evolutionary psychology, its topic selection (e.g., kinship, mate choice, parental care) and citation network – as well as its underappreciation of behavioral plasticity and cultural transmission mechanisms (e.g., Narvaez et al.; Ploeger, van der Maas, & Raijmakers, Reference Ploeger, van der Maas and Raijmakers2008) – align with that tradition.

Topic selection itself is not problematic; crucially, however, mainstream evolutionary psychology sits at odds with ecological psychology’s core assumptions. While ecological psychology leans toward empiricism (Blau & Wagman, Reference Blau and Wagman2022), the target article appeals to natural selection as a chief driving force. Goal shifts across life stages are treated as prespecified developmental programs (e.g., content-specific adaptations for kin detection, competition ratios, and threat detection) unfolding due to their survival or reproductive priority, whereas learning, practice, and cultural scaffolding should carry a major explanatory load. Invoking selection at points that call for proximate mechanisms recasts relational change as trait possession. For instance, quasi-sensory detection of genetic relatedness neglects socially learned markers (e.g., co-residence, given names, common rituals).

Moreover, this approach invites a modular, information-processing reading in which environments serve as inputs to specialized evaluator modules for prioritization, storage, and execution (e.g., attention, memory, decision-making). This bypasses morphology, skill practice, tools, roles, and norms that constitute different action sets. By contrast, in ecological traditions that rely on affordances as explanatory devices, the explananda are changes in organism–environment coupling (e.g., Pezzulo & Cisek, Reference Pezzulo and Cisek2016).

Properly specified affordances broaden developmental inquiry beyond trait possession and goal-shift analyses to how action possibilities are reorganized across development. Milestones can be reframed not as timed species-typical gains but as the emergence of new action possibilities under shared constraints. Behavioral shifts, therefore, reflect reorganization as bodies grow, skills are acquired, and practices change (barring limiting congenital conditions). As a working example, independent walking – typically achieved between 10 and 16 months – marks the point at which generic physical principles (e.g., gravity), bodily capacities (e.g., muscular strength), niche structure (e.g., a vertically organized environment), and culturally structured routines (e.g., handholding) align to make locomotor affordances reliably detectable and realizable; once mobility changes, the ambient action set changes in turn.

When grounded in ecological psychology, applications to developmental science can mitigate neurocentric reductionism and expand agency for vulnerable groups. Even authors who endorse multifaceted development are often drawn back to neurocentric accounts of adolescent problem behavior, appealing to “prefrontal immaturity” (e.g., Sapolsky, Reference Sapolsky2017). From an affordance framework, changes in the relation between adolescents’ bodily strength and skills and those of caregivers reconfigure the available action set. This helps explain why problem-behavior profiles differ from childhood to adolescence without defaulting to brain immaturity as the sole account.

In a similar vein, accounting for sex differences requires bodies and culture, not only reproductive asymmetries. Sex differences in psychopathology profiles (e.g., ADHD, depression, anxiety, anorexia nervosa) are evident from early childhood (e.g., Kieling et al., Reference Kieling, Buchweitz, Caye, Silvani, Ameis, Brunoni and Szatmari2024). Sex differences in muscular strength also emerge early (e.g., Nuzzo, Reference Nuzzo2025), potentially influencing awareness of physical vulnerability and the propensity of caregivers to tag certain children as hard to manage. In addition, beauty standards that valorize body control differ for girls/women and boys/men.

Early paradigmatic examples of affordances described physical-motor couplings such as passability (e.g., Yu & Stoffregen, Reference Yu and Stoffregen2012) or sittability (e.g., Mark, Reference Mark1987). However, affordances can also be used to describe relationships between other possibilities for action, such as cultural norms that constrain behavior. These are referred to as higher-order affordances (Stoffregen & Wagman, Reference Stoffregen and Wagman2025) and are invoked to describe social dynamics like those mentioned in the target article. However, such a level of analysis presupposes an inventory of first-order affordances and then demonstrates how practices, tools, and norms compose these into higher-order opportunities.

The paper links developmental change to shifting priorities but leaves unspecified the mechanisms that reorganize affordances. Mechanisms are needed to describe goal-updating processes that guide affordance shifts. Two non-mutually exclusive examples may be helpful. Mechanisms for plasticity (e.g., associative learning; Byrom & Murphy, Reference Byrom and Murphy2018) could explain the development of biases in detection thresholds and how existing behavior repertoires can be repurposed for novel situations. In addition, mechanisms for regulation of sub-goal perceptual states (e.g., Floegel et al., Reference Floegel, Kasper, Perrier and Kell2023) could account for online behavioral adjustments under perturbation.

In conclusion, the concept of affordances should be reserved for an explicitly ecological framework – where behavior is conceived as organism–environment coordination, not as the outcome of developmentally programmed shifts in goal priorities. Recentering on reciprocal relations and foregrounding mechanisms for plasticity and perceptual control would integrate developmental science with the affordance framework.