Towards a new ecological conception of perceptual information: Lessons from a developmental systems perspective

Abstract

Over the last two decades or so, empirical studies of perception, action, learning, and development have revealed that participants vary in what variable they detect and use and often rely on nonspecifying variables. This casts doubt on the Gibsonian conception of information as specification. It is argued that a recent ecological conception of information has solved important problems, but falls short in explaining what determines the object of perception. Drawing on recent work on developmental systems, we sketch the outlines of an alternative conception of perceptual information.It is argued that perceptual information does not reside in the ambient arrays; rather, perceptual information is a relational property of patterns in the array and perceptual processes. What a pattern in the ambient flow informs about depends on the perceiver who uses it. Here, we explore the implications of this alternative conception of information for the ecological approach to perception and action. The concept of information is a strongly debated notion in the study of perception and action. Indeed, among the issues that separate contemporary approaches to perception and action is the idea of what information is and where it resides. Proponents of indirect theories of perception have asserted that the information involved in perception exists both in the environment and the perceiver. Roughly speaking, this theory holds that the stimulus information that impinges on the senses is impoverished and needs to be enriched (e.g., Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1981;Neisser, 1967;Ullman, 1980). Thus, information residing in the animal enriches the impoverished stimulus information that the senses receive from the environment. Advocates of the theory of direct perception, by contrast, have claimed that all the information that is needed for perception is "out there" in the environment. J. J. Gibson (1966Gibson ( , 1979Gibson ( /1986, the founder of the ecological theory, asserted that the ambient energy arrays contain information that is rich and sufficient for perception. Because information in the arrays is specific to environmental properties, enrichment processes can be dispensed with. Perception is simply the extraction of specifying information that resides in the ambient array.Since its inception in the 1960s and 1970s, J. J. Gibson's ecological theory of perception and action has inspired many researchers, giving rise to a fruitful experimental program, the results of which are steadily accumulating (e

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