Gibson's approach to visual perception The question driving Gibson's research on perception was "how do we see the world as we do?". This instigated his empirical research, the environment, and how the individual experiences said environment. There were two primary ways in which Gibson reformed the way psychology views perception. The first is that the templates of our stimulation are affected by a moving organism. This was shown through his research on optic arrays. Secondly, he formulated the idea of three-dimensional space being conceptual. To Gibson, perception is a compilation of the person's environment and how the person interacts with it. James Gibson's major contributions throughout his career were published in three of his major works:
The Perception of the Visual World (1950),
The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966), and
The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979). Much of Gibson's work on perception derives from his time spent in the U.S. Army Air Force. Here, he delved into thoughts on how imperative perception is on daily functions. His work may be the first to show a distinct difference between types of perception.
Form perception, on one hand, is a display of two static displays, whereas object perception, involves one of the displays to be in motion. Gibson laid down the base for empirical perception research throughout his lifetime. He did work on adaptation and inspection of curved lines, which became a precursor for perceptual research later. His basic work rejected the perspective that perception in and of itself is meaningless, he instead argued meaning is independent of the perceiver. He claimed that the environment decides perception, and that meaning is in what the environment "affords" the observer.
Major works In his classic work
The Perception of the Visual World (1950) he rejected the then fashionable theory of
behaviorism for a view based on his own experimental work, which pioneered the idea that animals 'sampled' information from the 'ambient' outside world. He studied the concept of
optical flow (later published as part of his theory of affordance). According to Gibson, one determines the optical flow (which can be described as the apparent flow of the movement of objects in the visual field relative to the observer) using the pattern of light on the retina. The term '
affordance' refers to the opportunities for action provided by a particular object or environment. This concept has been extremely influential in the field of
design and
ergonomics: see for example the work of
Donald Norman who interacted with Gibson and who adapted Gibson's idea of affordances (with significant conceptual amendments) to industrial design. In his later work (such as, for example,
The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979)), Gibson became more philosophical and criticised
cognitivism in the same way he had attacked behaviorism before. Gibson argued strongly in favour of
direct perception and
direct realism (as pioneered by the Scottish philosopher
Thomas Reid), as opposed to cognitivist
indirect realism. He termed his new approach
ecological psychology. He also rejected the
information processing view of cognition. Gibson is increasingly influential on many contemporary movements in
psychology, particularly those considered to be
post-cognitivist. One of the most important statements in this book is that Gibson maintains that the optical information of an image is not an impression of form and color, but rather of invariants. A fixated form of an object only specifies certain invariants of the object, not its solid form. (p. 227) Meaning that there is far more information available to our perceptual systems than we are consciously aware of, which may lead us to puzzle over 'invariances' that our visual or other systems easily solve. Gibson did work on perception with his wife, Eleanor J Gibson. Together they proposed perceptual learning as a process of seeing the differences in the perceptual field around an individual. An early example of this is the classic research study done by
Eleanor Gibson and R. D. Walk, the
visual cliff experiment. In this experiment an infant that was new to crawling was found to be sensitive to depth of an edge.
Ecology and perception Gibson believed that the environment and animals are not separable items. He stated that without the environment animals cannot survive and without animals there is no environment. The environment is what we
perceive at any given moment. All animals are able to perceive. Humans perceive the environment directly. This is why we are unable to perceive things in the environment that are too small to see, such as an
atom.
Affordances Gibson coined the noun
affordance. For Gibson the noun affordance pertains to the environment providing the opportunity for action. Affordances require a relationship in which the environment and the animal can work together. An example is that mankind has changed the environment to better suit our needs. When coming across Earth's natural steep slopes, man designed stairs in order to afford walking. In addition, objects in the environment can also afford many different behaviors, such as lifting or grasping. Gibson argued that when we perceive an object we observe the object's affordances and not its particular qualities. He believed that perceiving affordances of an object is easier than perceiving the many different qualities an object may have. Affordances can be related to different areas of the
habitat as well. Some areas of the world allow for concealing while some allow for
foraging. == Legacy ==