The Gibsonian Approach to Direct Perception.

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The Gibsonian Approach to Direct Perception

There are 2 fundamentally opposing theoretical approaches to understanding perception, incorporating (1) the traditional constructivist paradigm and (2) the ecological paradigm.  The constructivist perspective, proposed mainly by Helmholtz, Gregory and Rock, holds that perception is essentially a construction of the mind, and is therefore indirect.  That is that in between the optical input and our perception of it, are intervening psychological processes involving mental elaboration.  They believe that sensory inputs are not sufficient to mediate perception alone and that something must be added to it before the final perceptual response it achieved.

Ecological theorists, on the other hand, and specifically Gibson (1950, 1966, 1979) developed a theory of direct perception that has completely rejected this scientific dogma by showing that perception was not based on sensory inputs or stimuli at all.  Instead he claimed that perception was based on ecological information, which is external to the organism.  The following essay will highlight the fundamental key components of this revolutionary theory in order to explain why this theory is so radical.  

Instead of concentrating on the information-processing going on within individuals as they see, Gibson examined the information that was available to the organism from its environment.  His first and major contention was that there was much more information available in the light that psychologists recognised, and that organisms had only to ‘pick up’ this information (Gibson 1966).  According to Gibson the starting point in perception is the ambient optic array.  This is due to the fact that light travels in straight lines and so therefore carries information about the environment through which it has travelled.  It is the structure in the light extended over space and time that provides direct information about the surfaces, substances and events for an observer (Davids et al, 1992).

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Surfaces are very important when discussing perception due to their texture gradients.  These gradients are constructed from textured elements, for example different shades of light and they provide important information about depth, shape, size, angle and distance.  As an example when we move, whether walking, or driving or flying a plane, the external world changes. Objects get nearer or more distant, and their texture gradients become broader or finer respectively. Gibson's theory considers how people might use dynamic visual information to guide our interactions with the environment. In particular, Gibson discussed the important of optic flow. This is visual ...

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