Gibson's Theory of Direct Perception

11 Key excerpts on "Gibson's Theory of Direct Perception"

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  Theories of Visual Perception

  • Ian E. Gordon(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  6 Direct perception and ecological optics: the work of J. J. Gibson

  . . . perceiving is an act, not a response, an act of attention, not a triggered impression, an achievement, not a reflex. (Gibson, 1979)

  The theoretical position to be described in this chapter owes a great deal to the work of one man, the American psychologist, J. J. Gibson. His claim that perception is in an important sense direct, and his development of what has been called ‘ecological optics’, are among the most interesting theoretical developments in modern perceptual research. Since his death, Gibson’s ideas have been refined and developed and he himself changed his views during the course of his career. In what follows we shall give a general account of what seem to be the most important aspects of this approach to perception; for the sake of clarity and economy, we shall not always indicate whether a particular idea or argument belongs to Gibson or to a follower of his, although major theoretical differences will be pointed out. The general term, ‘direct perception’, will be adopted. This has been given to the body of theory developed by Gibson and his followers that, it has been claimed, represents a new paradigm. The reader will note that, once again, visual examples dominate the account of a theory.

  The remainder of this chapter will cover the following topics:

  • J. J. Gibson.
  • An outline of the theory of direct perception.
  • An evaluation of the theory of direct perception.
  • More recent research.

  J. J. Gibson

  Gibson was born in 1904 and died in 1979. He was educated at Princeton and later took a teaching post at Smith College. He became known for his experiments and his theoretical writings after moving to Cornell University, where he stayed for the rest of his career.

  Gibson’s education gave him, initially, a behaviourist approach to his subject, although by the 1960s Gibson had come to disagree fundamentally with the assumptions of behaviourism. In fact, as his friend and colleague R. B. MacLeod has pointed out (MacLeod & Pick, 1974), in one sense Gibson was a functionalist of the old pre-behaviourist school. It must also be pointed out that Gibson came into contact with the distinguished Gestalt psychologist, Kurt Koffka, towards the end of the latter’s career, and came to hold his work in high esteem.

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  Discourse and the Continuity of Reference

  Representing Mental Categorization

  • Cornelia Zelinsky-Wibbelt(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Information which is not explicitly given is not hidden, but is also not yet an integrated part of the sys-tem. Different figure-ground constructions then result from different focusses of attention. Different focusses of attention in turn are induced by having learned to take different perspectives on the same state of affairs and by relying on different background knowledge. Without any notion of knowledge Gibson resembles the behaviourist Quine, who only relies on observations and who takes the meanings of terms as being established by all ostensively fixed referential activities. Analogously, Gibson's assumption of direct perception maintains that it is the sum of all perspectives taken on the same environmental part that determines the individual's invariant information. Gibson's approach to ecological realism 69 Gibson's claim of the capability of direct perception and his denial of higher-order processing is compatible with his denial of egocentric perception (cf. Gibson, 1982, 216), and he explains the latter with the claim that perception and self-awareness always complement each other (cf. Gibson, 1982, 125). Such a balance, however, would be the ideal which normally is not the case. Gibson's assumption of this ideal complementation is of course compatible with his assumption of all humans being capable of discovering their own ecological niche. This complementation would indeed be possible with direct perception. As soon as we assume experience to be subjective, however, the individ-uals' consciousness of the social relations is seen to result from their perception of the environment. Gibson claims that perception means to experience rather than to have information. Yet experience is never a direct representation of perceived information, but is always a sub-jective interpretation in terms of an individual's existing knowledge.

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  Phenomenology

  An Introduction

  • Stephan Käufer, Anthony Chemero(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  As noted above, the inferential approach to perception seemed to be necessitated by the poverty of the stimulus. But Gibson, in his first two books, shows that the stimulus is in fact not impoverished. This is the basis on which he rejects the inferential approach in The Ecological Approach. Indeed, he goes further and rejects the retinal image as the foundation of vision; our contact with the objects we perceive is not mediated by the retinal image. We can introduce the ecological approach as consisting in three principles: Principle 1: Perception is direct. To claim that perception is direct is to claim that perception is not the result of mental gymnastics, of inferences performed on sensory representations. The direct perception view is anti-representationalism about perception. When an animal perceives something directly, the animal is in non-mediated contact with that thing. This implies, of course, that the perceiving is not inside the animal, but rather is part of a system that includes both the animal and the perceived object. The idea of direct perception is intimately intertwined with a theory of environmental information. Principle 2: Perception is for action. The purpose of perception is for the generation and control of action. It is usually added to this that a good deal of action is also for perception or cognition. The intimate, two-way connection between perception and action has an immediate ring of evolutionary plausibility. Principle 3: Perception is of affordances. This third principle actually follows from the first two. If perception is direct (i.e., non-inferential) and for the guidance of action, there must be information sufficient for guiding action available in the environment. Gibson introduces affordances to fill this role. Affordances are often misunderstood, and their precise nature is the subject of significant controversy both within ecological psychology and in the wider cognitive science communities

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  Cognitive Psychology

  Revisiting the Classic Studies

  • Michael W. Eysenck, David Groome, Michael W. Eysenck, David Groome(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  30) Gibson was clearly concerned with high-level visual information processing when he proposed immediate and direct perception of the natural environment, but in doing so may have failed to appreciate that low-level sensory visual and perceptual mechanisms must have also, by definition, been optimised by evolution and adaptations. Thus, his impression of a seemingly effortless and ‘direct perception from the ambient array of light’ may simply be a reflection of the very fact that from the earliest stages our visual system has evolved for optimised processing of the statistical structures in natural scenes. Conclusions Gibson’s work has been extraordinarily important in getting a wide variety of vision scientists to think clearly about the sources of information that might be available to guide activities in the natural world. He should be credited for being one of the first to realise the necessity of moving away from artificial laboratory stimuli to the natural environment for the study of our sensory and perceptual apparatus. Owing to this revolutionary move we can now begin to understand why some our sensory components have evolved the particular properties that they have (e.g., the retinal centre-surround and the elongated cortical receptive field organisation, the particular forms of contrast response functions given the limited dynamic response ranges of those neurons and, the specific chromatic tuning of L & M cone photoreceptors that are suited for detecting fruit against foliage) and thus why our perceptual and cognitive networks function as they do

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  Places, Sociality, and Ecological Psychology

  Essays in Honor of Harry Heft

  • Miguel Segundo-Ortin, Manuel Heras-Escribano, Vicente Raja, Miguel Segundo-Ortin, Manuel Heras-Escribano, Vicente Raja(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 Perception and problem solving Edward Baggs and Sune Vork Steffensen DOI: 10.4324/9781003259244-5 4.1 Introduction Gibsonian psychology sometimes comes in for criticism along the following lines (Clark, 1998, 149 ff.). First, the critic grants that, yes, Gibson's ecological approach may provide a useful description of how perception works, at least for some limited set of animals and situations. But the critic then asserts that Gibson's approach simply cannot scale up to provide an account of how humans perform genuinely cognitively demanding tasks. Gibsonian psychology, we are told, is a non-starter when it comes to explaining, say, how we are able to remember the recipe for a lemon drizzle cake, or how we can plan what we will be doing at this time next Tuesday. Harry Heft has done more than most to defend Gibson's approach from such criticisms. Much of Heft's work has been focused on situating Gibson's perceptual program within the broader theoretical landscape of psychology. Heft's 2001 book, Ecological Psychology in Context, encompasses two projects. The first project is historical. In the first half of the book, Heft situates Gibson's ecological approach to perception within a particular historical tradition that begins with the phenomenologically rich psychology of William James and continues through the work of James's student, E. B. Holt. Heft's second project is more programmatic. In the second part of the book, Heft aims to expand ecological psychologists’ understanding of what the environment is. Gibson's work was often narrowly focused on the psychology of perception, and this led him to emphasize animals’ interactions with the inanimate furniture of the world around them: the substances, surfaces, and objects

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  Consciousness and Perceptual Experience

  An Ecological and Phenomenological Approach

  • Thomas Natsoulas(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  That technical concept is a concept belonging to Gibson’s ecological optics. The concept has specific reference to a total large solid angle of photic energy. That body of structured photic energy is projected to a perceiver’s point of observation. And, it can be “registered” by the per- ceiver’s visual system. Gibson’s notion of visual-system registration of photic energy does not imply that a field of view, which consists of structured photic energy, is in itself an experience whether of the light or anything else. Nor does it imply that the light whereof a field of view consists is in itself perceivable. Such photic registration by the visual system is, of course, a necessary part of both straightforward and reflective visual perceiving. But whatever these two perceptual activities may cause to be registered in the present sense is not in itself something that is therein apprehended. Assume a direct realism of perceptual occurrent awareness of the kind Gibson holds is true. Then, neither objective presentations nor fields of view nor sensa- tion complexes are what we have perceptual awareness of. The latter statement should be helpful in comprehending Gibson’s assertions, such as the two following, as to what we do not perceive: So when I assert that perception of the environment is direct, I mean that it is not mediated by retinal pictures, neural pictures, or mental pictures. (1979, p. 147) Viewing 339 Color, form, location, space, time, and motion – these are the chapter headings that have been handed down through the centuries, but they are not what is perceived. (p. 240) My quotation from Gibson (1979, p. 195) early in the present chapter may misleadingly sound as though Gibson was saying a shift by the perceiver to the activity of viewing is necessary in order for the visual system to provide visual occurrent awarenesses of the environmental surfaces that Gibson designated as the seen-now and the seen-from-here.

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  States of Consciousness

  The Pulses of Experience

  • Thomas Natsoulas(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Gibson (1979, p. 239) expressed as follows the relation that he posited between sensory perceiving and the consequent sensory-perceptual aware- nesses that the former directly causes to take place within the perceiver. Gibson stated that perceiving “involves awareness-of.” That is, it involves States of Consciousness: The Pulses of Experience 316 316 “awareness” of something in the environment or “awareness” of something belonging to the perceiver or “awareness” that is of both of the latter at once. To describe, as it is correct to do, sensory perceiving as necessarily involving the registering of stimulus information is not to say that this is all that sensory perceiving accomplishes. Gibson also states about sensory perceiving that this process or activ- ity in which a person engages is an “experiencing of things.” However, no one would want to infer from Gibson’s latter statement, its reference to a perceiver’s thereby having experiences of the environment, that for Gibson sensory perceiving amounts simply to something that is no more than a proper part of his or her stream of experience. Rather, for its being an experiencing of things, or for its producing sensory-perceptual aware- nesses in the stream, sensory perceiving is no less such a process as detects information present in a stimulus-energy flux. Gibson the perception theorist was proposing that the intentional objects that sensory-perceptual awareness is directed upon, or is said to be “of,” are not in themselves properties that are being instantiated by the stimulus-energy flux at the sense receptors. Such is not the case, notwith- standing the fact that the sensory-perceptual pickup, or detection, of the latter properties is, of course, a totally necessary part of the causal process. It is a necessary part in order for what then goes on to take place in the distinct realm of the experiential, owing to the kind of sensory perceiving that is transpiring.

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  Narrative, Perception, Language, and Faith

  • E. Wright(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  One psychologist of perception of the last century, James J. Gibson, tried to argue the sensory fields away. Ernst Gombrich has always been suspicious of his claim that visual experience was an epiphenomenal'luxury' (Gibson, 1971: 31), saying that he could not 'swallow Gibson's theory whole' (Gombrich, 1969: 43). Gibson should have heeded Ludwig Feuerbach's warning long ago that sensation is no 'mere luxury or trifle' (1966 [1843]: SO). Feuerbach's target was Hegel, but there are many philosophers today who seem not to appreciate that the world is first of all sensed and not known. Gibson even argued that 'visual perceptions are not necessary for visual perception' (1971: 31). Although we now know from the 'blindsight' experiments (Weiskrantz, 1999) that minimal adaptive assistance can be derived from low-level registration of input, nevertheless, to deny that sensation is not necessary for active perception amounts to a reductio ad absurdum of Gibson's own case. However, it is easy to see why this assertion is being made, because Gibson, more than any other psychologist of percep- tion, has drawn attention to automatic processes that alter the input in significant ways. He insists that the intake is not passive because there are automatic alterations to it that render the result apt for successful perceptual and motor interaction with the environment. However, he has made a simple logical error concerning this processing of the input before it gets to the sensory field. Let us take as a representative example, one that we have mentioned before concerning David Marr's vocabulary (p. 76), the production of sharper 'edges' for outlines of regions within the field. The result is to produce the equivalent of turning up the contrast knob on the TV screen. A Theory of Perception 85 But, as we saw, it is certainly not the case that producing such a change in the distribution on the screen is an automatic enhancer of information.

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  Acquisition and Performance of Sports Skills

  • Terry McMorris(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Although sports require the individual to be intuitive at times and analytic at other times, no research has, so far, been carried out examining the ability of individuals in the centre of the field dependent/independent continuum compared to those at the two extremes. The failure to do this is also surprising given the fact that, in sport, some displays are embedded, in Witkin’s meaning of the word, and some displays are not.

  Summary

  From an information processing viewpoint, perception is indirect or inferred. It is dependent mainly on experience, although innate abilities will have some effect. Memory plays a large role in the way in which we solve perceptual problems, as does perceptual style. The key issue would appear to be selective attention and how we are able to attend to relevant stimuli while disregarding irrelevant ones.

  Ecological psychology and perception

  To the information processing theorists, perception precedes action and the two are separate. To the ecological psychologists, perception does not end before action is undertaken, it continues to be activated in order control the movement. This is part of what the ecological psychologists call perception–action coupling, but it is only part of it. The other part is that perception, itself, is not carried out in isolation from action. Action is necessary for perception to take place. Gibson (1979) argued that we perceive to act, and act to perceive. In this section, we are concerned with the perception–action coupling that affects the initial perception of affordances. In Chapter 5 , we examine the perception–action coupling affecting our ability to anticipate, and in Chapter 6 , we look at the interaction with regard to motor control.

  According to Gibson, perception is only possible if we actively

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  Developmental Psychology

  How Nature and Nurture Interact

  • Keith Richardson(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Further, as the point of perception is to inform action, and all intelligent action is based upon adaptive utilization of the environment, perception must be deeply utilitarian - detection must be for use. Thus perception must be ‘rich’ in the sense of giving information about what can be done, not what ‘is’. This is in total contradiction with the traditional notion that perceptual input was about mere appearances, not informative, while only concepts (the work of cognition) were about reality, and valid knowledge was gained only from the latter, not the former.

  Gibson asked simply: what criteria were used to build the concepts which are used to judge the perceptual data? The answer cannot be perceptual as these are, according to the traditional view, unreliable, but they also cannot be conceptual because if they were, we are bound to ask by which process they gained their powerful status. The argument is circular. In the end some criteria cannot be conceptual and so the sufficient evidence for some knowledge of the world must be perceptual. As Gibson (1979, p. 253) put it:

  The fallacy is to assume that because inputs convey no knowledge they can somehow be made to yield knowledge by ‘processing’ them. Knowledge of the world cannot be explained by supposing that knowledge of the world already exists [in the form of representations, concepts - my addition]. All forms of cognitive processing imply cognition so as to account for cognition.

  Gibson is referring to a logical fallacy here. The key element of the theory is thus that some perception involves the direct picking-up of dynamic external invariance which acts as specifications of states or events, e.g. presence of prey, food, etc.

  Empirical evidence against the ‘cognitive’position

  There is also strong empirical evidence, some of it described in Chapter 6 , but here is a foretaste. Butterworth (1993), in Smith and Thelen, considered the logic of the traditional position, as exemplified by Piaget’s view that all knowledge has to be constructed and nothing can be directly perceived. If this is the case then learning will occur through developing associations between what is known, for instance, what can actually be touched and felt in the act of reaching, with what is not initially known, like how images on the retina from distal objects relate to the distance away of objects. In this way the retinal information gets calibrated via the knowledge gained directly by touch. This implies that infants will be better at learning to reach if they can see the object and their own hands than if they cannot. If, on the other hand, they pick-up the invariances which specify position and distance (and they should be able to do this through a variety of modes, remember) by purely perceptual means, they will learn just as quickly whether they can ‘calibrate’ touch and vision or not. Clifton et al.

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  Explorations in Cinema through Classical Indian Theories

  New Interpretations of Meaning, Aesthetics, and Art

  • Gopalan Mullik(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  However, film theories generally ignore “low-level” perception for the sake of higher level processes. 46 While scientific research is continuously discovering how complex perceptual processes are, yet the Gibsonian idea that some basic assumptions are necessary to give stability to what one perceives has struck deep root. 47 Even Hochberg and Brooks, who detail scientific discoveries that undercut common sense beliefs about perception, favorably comment on the criterion of “normal life” used by Helmholtz in his likelihood principle : “That principle must surely be at least approximately true, or we could not survive.” 48 One may conclude from the above brief mention that a large part of what we perceive comes through direct perception in terms of human beings” experiences of living in the world. Perception also involves “higher thoughts,” even though, in terms of current scientific knowledge, the boundaries between direct perception and analytical meaning have not yet been clearly demarcated. In all these areas, Nyāya theory of perception fares very well indeed. Illustration 4.1 Concepts in the Nyāya Theory of Perception (Pratyakṣa) The Self : Even though the true state of the self is devoid of all “consciousness” and “agency” in the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika theory, its false identification with matter develops within it material “desires” of interacting with the world. For this purpose, the self manufactures an appropriate material body from surrounding matter to be able to engage with the world. The resulting “self-body system” acquires an “intentional consciousness” (a “consciousness” which arises only on sighting a ‘object’, et cetera) and “agency.” The Body : The body has three prominent parts, the body, the sense organs, and the mind, in which the organs detect sense data, the mind classifies the data and the body reacts to it to maximize bodily “pleasure,” minimize bodily “pain” and remain “indifferent” toward others

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