Semantic-First Spatial Cognition: A Functional Affordance Architecture for Visual Understanding

Abstract

We propose that the standard vision pipeline inverts the actual structure of biological spatial cognition. Spatial awareness is grounded in functional semantics: geometric structure becomes accessible to reasoning only through prior contextual and affordance encoding. We formalize this as the Semantic-First Spatial (SFS) architecture and derive testable predictions distinguishing it from geometry-first alternatives.

Suggested Citation

BibTeX

@misc{farzulla2025_semantic_first_vision,
  author       = {Farzulla, Murad},
  title        = {Semantic-First Spatial Cognition: A Functional Affordance Architecture for Visual Understanding},
  year         = {2025},
  howpublished = {ASCRI Discussion Paper DP-2505},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.18091090},
  url          = {https://systems.ac/5/DP-2505}
}

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