Gibson's Theory of Direct Perception

Theories of Perception in Psychology

There are two major approaches to understanding perception in psychology. One theory, the direct theory of perception proposed by Gibson (1966), posits that what we perceive is a direct representation of the world around us. Moreover, the information environment provides is sufficient to lead to perception directly.

Gregory's constructivist theory of perception argues that sensation provides ambiguous and incomplete information about the environment. Therefore, interpretation is necessary to create a mental image of our world.

In the constructivist view, we don't perceive the world directly. What we perceive is our interpretation that our past experiences, beliefs, expectations, and emotions can influence.

Gibson's Theory of Direct Perception

Gibson's theory (1966) argued that perception is a direct process. Direct, meaning sensations themselves are enough to create a complete representation of the world around us. Gibson challenged the constructivist view; he proposed that there is no need for interpretation or inference as sensory data is sufficient.

Here is an overview of the main points in Gibson's theory of perception.

• Perception is a direct, bottom-up process. Perception doesn't require the use of past knowledge or the interpretation of sensory data.
• Sensory data is rich, complex, and sufficient to make accurate environmental judgments.
• Perception is an innate process that is a result of evolution.

Sensory data, like visual information, is complex and can provide us with information like depth, motion or distance.

The Influence of Nature on Perception

Direct perception was proposed to be innate rather than learnt. It likely evolved as a product of evolution. Direct perception allows animals to quickly and reliably respond to the threats in the environment and therefore benefits their survival. The animals that developed the ability to quickly process information from the environment were, therefore, more likely to survive.

Bottom-up Theory of Perception

Gibson's theory proposes that perception is a bottom-up process. Bottom-up processing is data-driven and fully based on sensory information.

This process is direct, the information travels only in one direction, and past experiences or interpretations are not required to make accurate judgments about the environment.

Fig. 2 - Bottom-up processing.

In contrast, the top-down theory of perception (constructivist approach) argues that our past experiences and expectations heavily influence perception. Previous knowledge is used to make guesses and interpret sensations that we experience.

Fig. 3 - Top-down processing.

Example of Gibson's Theory of Direct Perception

We will examine real-life examples of Gibson's theory, including affordance and motion parallax.

Affordance

Gibson is considered to be a founder of ecological psychology. Ecological psychology proposes that perception should be studied in a natural environment instead of a lab and that perception and action are inherently connected. Our environment directly guides our behaviour by offering us opportunities to act. Gibson referred to these opportunities as affordances.

The idea of affordances is that we receive information about how we can act about it by looking at objects. According to Gibson, we can directly perceive affordances; we don't need any prior knowledge to decide how to act.

Motion Parallax

Motion parallax is a visual, monocular depth cue. Think about how the objects in your visual field move when you are in motion. When we are moving, objects near appear to move faster in relation to us, while objects far away appear to move slower.

Motion parallax is a way for us to directly gain information about the distance of objects around us based on the sensory information we receive.

Evaluation of Direct Theory of Perception

Gibson's (1966) theory addresses some of the limitations of the constructivist approach, which undermined the direct role of sensory data. However, critics also point out a few problems with this approach.

Strengths of the Direct Theory of Perception

First, let's examine the strengths of the direct theory of perception.

• The theory rightfully points out that a large portion of perception is innate and doesn't require past experience. For example, infants intuitively show fear of rights when approaching a cliff, even if they haven't experienced falling off of a cliff before.
• Sensory data can provide accurate motion and depth information, as exemplified by motion parallax.
• Perception also occurs relatively fast; we can respond to the environment almost instantaneously, which the direct theory of perception better explains. The constructivist view of perception requires additional interpretation of information, which should take longer than direct perception.

Limitations of the direct theory of perception

Now, let's examine the limitations of the direct theory of perception.

• One limitation of Gibson's theory is that it doesn't explain visual illusions, which demonstrates that sometimes sensory information is insufficient to represent what we perceive accurately.

Some stimuli (e.g. distorted images or sounds) don't make sense to us. Still, after being primed with another stimulus, we can suddenly make sense of them (e.g. hidden dalmatian dog optical illusion).

Gibson argued that illusions are artificial and often taken out of context, which is why our perception of them is inaccurate. Our perception evolved to make sense of rich sensory stimuli embedded in even richer contexts. Natural illusions limit this argument. Natural illusions occur in the natural world despite the rich context they are embedded in.

• It is also unclear how affordances work. Some have argued that most affordances result from learning rather than innate knowledge.

• It is hard to ignore instances where we don't perceive everything directly in our environment. Especially in busy environments, we can focus on more important stimuli while ignoring others selectively.