Abstract
J.J. Gibson’s ecological approach to visual perception (1960a, 1961, 1966, 1979) is antithesis to any picture theory of visual perception, yet it entails a most viable theory of picture perception! Perceiving, for Gibson, is the coordinate tuning of “perceptual systems”, nothing less than complete, behaving organisms, to inexhaustively available, continuously transforming “stimulus information”. The perceiving of pictures or, rather, the perceiving of something staticly depicted, obviously constitutes a significant issue to such an account of visual perception. Conversely, it might be said that the traditional theories of visual perception, which are based on the assumption that the retinal image, or images, require further processing and analysis in certain sub-centers of the brain, should have great difficulties in explaining visual perception as it occurs in our everyday surroundings where “the stimulus” is quite unlike a static picture.
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Landwehr, K. (1990). Introduction: The ecological optics of information surfaces. In: Landwehr, K. (eds) Ecological Perception Research, Visual Communication, and Aesthetics. Recent Research in Psychology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-84106-4_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-84106-4_1
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