MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences - Cryptome

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Gibson, James Jerome
In his last book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception,
James Gibson (1904–1979) concluded with a plea that
the terms and concepts of his theory “...never shackle thought
as the old terms and concepts have!” He was referring to the
framework of traditional perception, as was reflected, for
example, in the classical problem of space perception Bishop
Berkeley posed more than three hundred years ago (Berkeley
1963). How is it possible to perceive three-dimensional space
when the input to our senses is a two-dimensional retinal surface
in the case of vision, or a skin surface in the case of
touch? Logically, it seemed this inadequate stimulation had
to be supplemented somehow to account for our ordinary
perception of a three-dimensional world. There have been
two general proposals for the nature of this supplementation.
An empiricist proposal, advocated by Berkeley himself,
based the supplementation in the prior experience of the individual.
The alternative nativist proposal based the supplementation
in the innate functioning of the mental apparatus
which intrinsically imposes a three-dimensional structure on
two-dimensional stimulation. These two alternatives in only
slightly modified forms persist to this day.
Gibson challenged Berkeley’s initial assumption, asserting
that there is indeed sufficient information available to
observers for perceiving a three-dimensional world. It does
not have to be supplemented from our past experience or
from our innate mental operations. Gibson’s refutation of
the traditional formulation depended on confirming the
hypothesis that information is sufficient to account for what
we perceive. He argued that the traditional physical analysis
of energy available to our senses (rays of light and sound
waves) is the wrong level of analysis for perceiving organisms
with mobile eyes in mobile heads who look and walk
around. Rather, light in ambient arrays (as opposed to radiant
light) is structured by, and fully specifies, its sources in
the objects and events of the world we perceive. He showed
that if the entire structure of the optic array at any point in
space were examined, rather than punctate stimuli impinging
on the retina, the information available is exceedingly
rich. Moreover it specifies important features of the environment.
Thus textured optic arrays specify surfaces, gradients
of texture specify slanted or receding surfaces, changing
patterns in the structure are specific to particular types of
object and observer movement, and so on.
Two implications of Gibson’s reformulation need to be
emphasized. First, patterns of stimulation change when an