What comes first? Perception or action-potential?

Do you need to perceive an affordance (see an opportunity) before you can act? Or does the opportunity only exist if you can do something with it?

These thoughts have been provoked by an interesting thought experiment from Harigovind S — can we define a “hierarchy of tasks” for batting?

What comes first?

I don’t disagree fundamentally with Harigovind’s ordering of mechanistic tasks, although I might combine the interceptive/motor tasks with movement (“advanced”) tasks — if you are in the wrong place to play the ball, correct biomechanics will be of little use.

But, from an ecological dynamics perspective I would want to include perception of affordances (opportunities offered by the delivery, the field settings, the playing field itself) as a discrete step in the hierarchy.

And, from a coaching/learning angle, also to include motivation. I probably go with Whitehead on this, as in other learning situations: Romance — Precision — Generalisation.

In this instance, that becomes:

• Intent (wanting to do something)
• Capability (being able to do something — Harigovind’s mechanistic analysis)
• Perception-Action (perceiving the affordance and exploiting it by deploying the capability developed in the 2nd phase)

But at a deeper level, I still have not answered the original question in the title. What comes first, perception or action-potential.

Or “does an affordance exist if you cannot exploit it?”.

I am tending towards intent (Whitehead’s “romance”) as the first step.

But then?