Evolutionary perspectives reveal that features intuitively perceived as “good” or “bad” have no such inherent properties. Instead, human cognitive systems evolved to produce perceptions that tracked fitness-relevant features of ancestral environments and motivated adaptive behavior accordingly. Consider Cosmides and Tooby’s (Reference Cosmides and Tooby1997) proposal that there is nothing intrinsically negative about a pile of dung. We perceive it as such because, for our hominin ancestors, contact with feces carried nontrivial infection risks while offering few offsetting benefits. For a dung fly, whose ancestors relied on feces as both a hunting ground and a food source for offspring, perception is entirely different. The same dung’s odor is not aversive and might even be perceived as positively as freshly baked cinnamon rolls are to humans.

Ko and Neuberg extend this insight to a within-species and even within-individual lens. Because the fitness consequences of specific ecological features differ across life stage, sex, and other variables, those features should be perceived differently by different individuals. Many aspects of Ko and Neuberg’s proposal are doubtlessly correct, and even more are sure to be generative. One limitation might, at first blush, seem merely semantic: the meaning of perception. But given that perc- appears over 70 times in the target article, the term sits at the core of their framework. Using a single label to capture functionally and mechanistically distinct phenomena poses risks analogous to what personality psychologists have labeled the jingle fallacy – the erroneous assumption that two instruments measure the same construct simply because they have the same label (e.g., see Hilbig & Moshagen’s, Reference Hilbig and Moshagen2025, discussion of Agreeableness). Here, I break down Ko and Neuberg’s use of perception into distinct phenomena, each engaging with ecological affordances in different ways.

One reference to perception aligns with the types of signal detection problems highlighted by Error Management Theory (Haselton & Buss, Reference Haselton and Buss2000). Ko and Neuberg discuss two prominent examples: (1) detecting sexual interest (Brandner, Pohlman, & Brase, Reference Brandner, Pohlman and Brase2021) and (2) detecting aggressive intent (Becker et al., Reference Becker, Mortensen, Ackerman, Shapiro, Anderson, Sasaki and Kenrick2011). In both domains, cues can yield hits, misses, false alarms, or correct rejections. Ko and Neuberg suggest that mental mechanisms calibrate decision thresholds according to developmental background, current ecology, or both. Empirical work supports developmental calibration to ecological contexts (Ellis et al., Reference Ellis, Abrams, Masten, Sternberg, Tottenham and Frankenhuis2022), and modeling work informs the evolvability of different degrees of plasticity in response to different ecological factors (Frankenhuis & Walasek, Reference Frankenhuis and Walasek2020). Ultimately, this kind of perception reflects where our minds set the threshold for interpreting cues – tilting us toward seeing interest versus indifference or threat versus safety.

Another use of perception in the target article involves identifying what an individual can do with a specific feature of the environment in the current situation. To take an example from Neuberg and colleagues (Reference Neuberg, Williams, Sng, Pick, Neel, Krems and Pirlott2020), an orange could be used as a food or as a projectile. The adaptations underlying this type of perception would need to detect specific features of an individual’s internal state (Do I need rest? Do I need calories?) and external situation (Am I being chased? Am I being socially evaluated?) and then interpret objects in the environment as useful (or not) for navigating that situation.

Yet another potential meaning of perception perhaps most closely corresponds with the folk meaning of the term: the qualia experienced in response to ecological conditions. Here, adaptations translate specific environmental conditions (e.g., temperature, ambient light) into specific qualia, which are tailored to the challenges and opportunities of each condition. Perceiving cold motivates one to seek warmth via other bodies, fire, or insulation; perceiving heat motivates one to seek shade, water, or to shed clothing; perceiving bright light prompts eye shielding or gaze aversion; perceiving darkness often elicits vigilance or seeking the company of others. Naturally, humans do not have adaptations for detecting all environmental hazards. Some with drastic fitness consequences, such as carbon monoxide or ionizing radiation, have no corresponding qualia-based perception. Our capacity to perceive ecological features is constrained by the evolvability of perceptual systems and the presence and consequence of those features in ancestral environments (Barrett, Reference Barrett2014).

Is there a qualia specifically associated with an ecology’s average genetic relatedness or its sex ratio? Probably not. But perception can also refer to phenomena associated neither with subjective experience nor conscious recognition. For example, people do not consciously “perceive” their circulating testosterone levels, yet those levels can shift effort between mating and parenting (Grebe et al., Reference Grebe, Sarafin, Strenth and Zilioli2019). Ecological features like sex ratio could work in a similar way: specialized mechanisms could take environmental cues that covary with sex ratio as input and adjust behavior accordingly (see, e.g., Brandner, Dillon, & Brase, Reference Brandner, Dillon and Brase2020). Alternatively, behaviors that seem responsive to sex ratios could emerge without any such specialized mechanisms. For instance, repeated failures in mate competition under an unfavorable sex ratio might generate phenomenological experiences that mentally represent opportunity costs (e.g., frustration, boredom, restlessness; Kurzban et al., Reference Kurzban, Duckworth, Kable and Myers2013), which in turn motivate greater mating effort, heightened intrasexual competition, or relocation to more favorable ecologies.

Ko and Neuberg have taken a novel step toward integrating behavioral ecology, social psychology, and adaptationist cognitive science. One of the key insights of the latter is that evolution does not produce minds that teleologically navigate toward positive fitness outcomes. Instead, mental mechanisms are specialized for treating specific features of the world as information and, subsequently, producing behaviors with positive expected fitness consequences. Carving the mind at its functional joints benefits from reserving distinct terms for distinct mechanisms (Pietraszewski & Wertz, Reference Pietraszewski and Wertz2022). Although treating “perception” as encompassing detection thresholds, situational affordances, qualia, and downstream fitness-related phenomenology may ease communication, doing so risks a conceptual jingle fallacy and, in turn, can obscure distinctions critical for understanding the mind’s design. Explicitly disentangling these meanings of perception will not only sharpen the affordance-management perspective; it will also advance the broader project of evolutionary behavioral science.