Melina Gastelum Vargas

This paper introduces the Dynamic Affordance Trajectory Framework (DATF), a multiscalar approach to understanding human behavior and identity formation. It integrates short-term perception-action cycles, medium-term adaptation, and long-term sociocultural influences, emphasizing the dynamic relationship between agents and their environments in three scales: micro, meso and macro. Central to the framework is the concept of affordance trajectories – the evolving opportunities for action that unfold over time. The DATF also incorporates affective niches and ontogenetic niche trajectories, tracing environmental influences on development. The framework highlights how cognitive agency is distributed, emphasizing the interdependence of individual development. This synergy enhances understanding of individual adaptation within social and ecological networks. By showcasing key concepts such as learning music and performing as a worker in a world of changing conditions, the DATF demonstrates its ability to provide a richer understanding of human experiences. By applying the DATF to education, therapy, and community planning, this framework emphasizes the ability for human understanding. This framework contextualizes behavior within evolving landscapes of opportunity and constraint, and calls for future research to explore its applications.

The aim of the paper is to deepen into a theoretical account on the role of behavioral settings and relational affordative space and how this perspective can be used to reconceptualize various human cognitive developmental trajectories and conditions. In the course of this theoretical work, we want to contribute in rethinking developmental trajectories based on the role of behavioral settings and relational affordances from an embodied perspective. Behavioral settings emerge from joint actions in conjunction with the affordances available. These affordances will have multiple levels and kinds of meanings for the organism which is why we need to distinguish between the general affordances for a form of life and the particular affordances for particular agents that are generated through sensorimotor interactions. We propose to apply this theoretical frame in different developmental conditions, taking as a leading example the Autistic Spectrum, extending it to other lived experiences of other groups marginalized by “normative behavioral settings” – and the ensuing ethical concerns.