" In his later work (such as, for example, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979)), Gibson became more philosophical and criticised cognitivism in the same way he had attacked behaviorism before. Gibson argued strongly in favour of direct perception and direct realism (as pioneered by the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid), as opposed to cognitivist indirect realism. He termed his new approach ecological psychology. He also rejected the information processing view of cognition. Gibson is increasingly influential on many contemporary movements in psychology, particularly those considered to be post-cognitivist.[10] One of the most important statements in this book is that Gibson maintains that the optical information of an image is not an impression of form and color, but rather of invariants. A fixated form of an object only specifies certain invariants of the object, not its solid form. (p. 227)[15] Meaning that there is far more information available to our perceptual systems than we are consciously aware of, which may lead us to puzzle over ‘invariances’ that our visual or other systems easily solve. Gibson did work on perception with his wife, Eleanor J Gibson. Together they proposed perceptual learning as a process of seeing the differences in the perceptual field around an individual. An early example of this is the classic research study done by Eleanor Gibson and R. D. Walk, the visual cliff experiment. In this experiment an infant that was new to crawling was found to be sensitive to depth of an edge."
The part about fixated form, is it saying that objects aren’t solid? I thought he was a direct realist.
But that is all part of the complete cognitive system.
One thing is established science and that involves the separation of the brain from direct observation of its environment. Input is via senses and neural transmission of codified data.
It is in the translation that cognition of variables becomes critical as compared with the invariant (fixed) coded data in memory. (Descartes)
IMO, cognition is a form of perceived “difference equation”, where the brain makes a “best guess” of incoming data, based on the coded “variation on a theme”.
The brain knows that a house is a box with a roof. But each house has a slightly different shape or color scheme and those are the differences that trigger the brain’s cognitive experience.
An interesting aside is that the oldest words in a given dictionary have the most “common (invariant) denominators”, like the words “home” or “food” (see definitions), which have the same invariant of “place of origin” (homebase), and “nourishment of sorts” (food for thought).
Cognition is regulated via “selective attention”
Selective attention is the cognitive process that allows us to:
Choose and focus on something in the environment while suppressing irrelevant information.
Tune out unimportant details and concentrate on what matters.
Filter out distractions and perform tasks effectively.
Well I thought his direct realism bit was a bit odd since I think that idea was put to be due to optical illusions, the fact that experience can influence perception, and lets not forget that dress that broke the internet.
As for what that thing itself means…I don’t really know. I read it over and over to try to glean more from it and couldn’t figure it out on my own.
