I am surprised to discover that 'mental affordances' is a new thing. Isn't intuition the same as mental affordances? That is intuition defined as automated mental processes that are learned through experience. academic.oup.com/mind/article-a…
That said, humans are equipped with innate affordances that aid in our ability to learn. For example, we automatically see the intentions of another and thus are able to mimic that behavior with the added knowledge of why that behavior was performed.
Related to this are mental affordances available also to other social species. The ability to recognized indexical expressions and the ability to coordinate actions.
Even the ability to defer action, as in a squirrel storing food for the winter, is a mental affordance.
The above paper argues that more basic functions such as counting, imagining rotation and attention are mental affordances. Indeed they are and they are the kinds also available to many animal species.
Affordance is the recognition of potential and this implies a recognition of energy or in more abstract terms, useful information. Useful information implies that the perceiving organism understands what information is useful.
Every living this understands the difference in form that makes a difference in action.
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