Situational determinants of perception: clues from gravity models

Abstract

The assumption of the existence of objective truth remains, even today, the absolute foundation of scientific research enterprise. In the spatial analytic work of geographers this assumption appears to have diffused, not necessarily with logic, into our appraisals of everyday behaviours. This manifests itself in our tendency to assume implicitly 'correctness' (or optimality or maximality) in the human decision process, if only as an idealised goal in decision making. In this connection there is certainly a wealth of evidence to be found of relationships between the volume of available relevant information and effectiveness of decision (e.g. Pred 62 Kibel, 1970), given a known common goal and something approaching homogeneity in the value systems of decision-makers.In even less tightly experimental situations such as most of those with which spatial analysis is concerned, both goals and value-systems have to be assumed or inferred, with inevitable attendant ambiguity in the establishment of causal relationships. Concepts of optimality then become much harder to sustain, so that even in times such as our own where notions such as 'efficiency' and related 'optimality' appear to have been assimilated into the folklore of the age, we have nevertheless recognised the shortcomings of these concepts by our acceptance of the essentially negativistic notion of the 'satisficer'. To date however geographers do not appear to have come to grips with such 'clouding' behavioural motives as play activity, ritualism, power-assertion, fear-avoidence, and continue to seek explanations of spatial phenomena in terms of the familiar goals of essentially the 'economic efficiency' family. INFORMATION AND DISTORTIONOne relevant area however in which work is being advanced is concerned with the human capacity to select and process information. This area of work concerns the phenomenon of perceptual distortion and therefore relates to 'error'

Threat and stress in the Clarence River estuary of Northern New South Wales

“…Such considerations conform to the situational-constraint hypothesis developed by Woolmington (1975) and reflect the importance of the location/vocation aspects of cognitive configurations of environments discussed by Wilson (1977). That is to say, the fishers are located downstream of the areas in which flood-mitigation works have been established: they are concerned with the outputs (i.e., water aspects) of these works and not the landbound aspects thereof, in the sense of their vocation, which is to catch fish in commercial quantities.…”

“…In gestaltist terms the functional location of the perceiver in an environmental configuration can determine the particular constrained perspective that is adopted (Lewin, 1936;Woolmington, 1975). Wilson (1977) suggests that two important components of such configurations are the locations and the vocations of the perceivers.…”