title: Cultural Affordances: Scaffolding Local Worlds Through Shared Intentionality and Regimes of Attention.
abstract: In this paper we outline a framework for the study of the mechanisms involved in the engagement of human agents with cultural affordances. Our aim is to better understand how culture and context interact with human biology to shape human behavior, cognition, and experience. We attempt to integrate several related approaches in the study of the embodied, cognitive, and affective substrates of sociality and culture and the sociocultural scaffolding of experience. The integrative framework we propose bridges cognitive and social sciences to provide (i) an expanded concept of 'affordance' that extends to sociocultural forms of life, and (ii) a multilevel account of the socioculturally scaffolded forms of affordance learning and the transmission of affordances in patterned sociocultural practices and regimes of shared attention. This framework provides an account of how cultural content and normative practices are built on a foundation of contentless basic mental processes that acquire content through immersive participation of the agent in social practices that regulate joint attention and shared intentionality.
authors: Department of Philosophy, McGill University, Montreal, QCCanada; Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University, Montreal, QCCanada.
authors: Maxwell J D
authors: MJ
authors: Ramstead
authors: Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University, Montreal, QCCanada; Department of Anthropology, McGill University, Montreal, QCCanada; Raz Lab in Cognitive Neuroscience, McGill University, Montreal, QCCanada; Department of Communication and Media Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of JohannesburgJohannesburg, South Africa.
authors: Samuel P L
authors: SP
authors: Veissière
authors: Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University, Montreal, QC Canada.
authors: Laurence J
authors: LJ
authors: Kirmayer
keywords: affordances (ecological psychology); cognitive anthropology; cultural affordances; enactive cognitive neuroscience; free-energy principle; predictive processing; radical embodied cognition; regimes of attention