"An affordance is a possibility for action provided to an organism by things and creatures in its environmental niche, given the organism’s particular sensorimotor, perceptual, and cognitive abilities..."
(Taves et al., 2018, p. 208)
The general language is inclusive of human beings and other creatures. I use the word lifeform below. Affordances may be viewed as important to the development of worldviews.
An environmental niche refers to all of the affordances available to a population in a specific environmental setting. This has been called the landscape of affordances by Ramstead et al. (2016).
Two types of affordances
Natural affordances are those possibilities that a lifeform can act on given its abilities and environment. Example, nuts afford eating for squirrels.
Conventional affordances depend on possibilities to act according to one's cultural expectations. Cultural schemas include expectations about relating to people, places, object, and events.
References
Ramstead, M. J., Veissière, S. P., & Kirmayer, L. J. (2016). Cultural affordances: Scaffolding local worlds through shared intentionality and regimes of attention. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1090. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01090
Taves, A., Asprem, E., & Ihm, E. (2018). Psychology, meaning making, and the study of worldviews: Beyond religion and non-religion. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 10(3), 207–217. https://doi.org/10.1037/rel0000201
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