Direct Perception

James Gibson (20th century psychologist in visual perception) rejected information processing view of cognition:

``Information is sufficient to construct an accurate representation of disposition of objects in space.''

Ecological psychology: mind directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or processing.

Direct perception (or realism): sensory perception is the direct result of information from the surrounding envionment.

• sensory information is all that is necessary (inferences are not);
• a ``bottom-up'' approach:
  • knowledge about an environment is ``pieced together'' from what is directly perceived;
  • larger subsystems are gradually created until a complete top-level system is formed;

E.g.: a person standing in a library would see books, shelves, and other furniture:

• superpositioning of shelves and their decreasing size provides direct information about depth and size of library;