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.
@misc{farzulla2025semanticfirstvision,
author = {Farzulla, Murad},
title = {Semantic-First Spatial Cognition: A Functional Affordance Architecture for Visual Understanding},
year = {2025},
howpublished = {Farzulla Research Discussion Paper DP-2505},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.18091090},
url = {https://farzulla.org/papers/semantic-first-vision}
}