Digital environments reshaping children’s ecological affordance management: Hybrid ecologies, parallel strategies, and environmental shaping

Key Points

• This research explores how digital environments affect children's ability to manage ecological affordances through altered mechanisms.
• Extended theories of affordance management to include digital contexts.
• Identified changes in attention and feedback mechanisms due to hybrid ecologies.
• Evaluated how algorithms influence children's developmental pathways.
• Hybrid digital-physical ecologies significantly change attention and feedback mechanisms.
• Parallel strategies disrupt typical developmental sequences in children.
• Commercial algorithms conflict with the needs for autonomous development in children.

Abstract