Gibson
Gibson, James Jerome
Perception /Vision
Perception is a very broad term, which covers all those cognitive/brain processes involved in receiving and interpreting information about our environment, via one of the sense organs. For example, vision involves an experience of objects in three dimensions, with a sense of how far they are from us, how large they are, how fast they are moving, and many other factors.Perception involves a complex chain of processing by the brain. The raw stimuli produced by sense organs such as eyes and ears is organised and interpreted by increasingly more complex brain processes into more holistic perceptions of objects having a certain size, distance, colour etc. The actual human experience of perception doesn't just involve receiving a series of disconnected visual or auditory impulses: a great deal of brain processing goes into organising this material into coherent entities. For example, instead of seeing a series of disconnected black and white stripes and blobs, there might be a perception of your cat leaping towards you. Some psychologists have tried to simulate perception via computer models (sometimes embodied in simple robots), and this has shown what complex processes perception involves.
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It was from this work that he developed the notion of ecological perception in a dynamic, visually rich, world. Gibson's theories are not easily classified within the perspectives we have chosen, as his work was really a reaction to the traditional approach to perception typified by the early work of Bishop Berkeley some 300 years ago.
He was also influenced by - but did not always agree academically with – his wife Eleanor Jack Gibson.
Gibson proposed an alternative nativist approach basing the supplementation of the perceived image in the innate functioning of the mental apparatus which intrinsically imposes a three-dimensional structure on two-dimensional stimulation and makes use of the richness of a dynamic and ever-changing visual world to do so.
J.J.Gibson (1904 – 1979) was born in the USA and studied at both Princeton and Edinburgh Universities.
These influences perhaps explain his approach to perception which eschewed the notion of extensive cognitive processing being necessary to perceive the world in favour (as mentioned above) of 'direct perception'.
He taught Psychology at Smith College (1928-1949) and Cornell (1949-1972). During World War II he was the director of a research unit in Aviation Psychology for the US Air Force.
This traditional approach suggested that perceptual information was incomplete and therefore needed to be supplemented in some way by the experience of the individual.
His unit studied and constructed tests that could be used to guide pilot selection. Like Broadbent , the work Gibson did during the war influenced his later work in psychology. He had become particularly interested in the information from the visual world available to pilots when taking off and landing, which he called 'optic flow' patterns to characterise the notion of the visual image flowing past the moving aircraft.
It is an ecological approach, suggesting how perception might operate in the 'real world' with the emphasis on the function of perception rather than the mechanism.
Written by: Course Team
Gibson's approach has therefore been included in cognitive psychology – if only as a reaction to it. Gibson was influenced by Kurt Koffka, a Gestalt psychologist.
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