The Ecological Approach to Perception Claudia

Perception refers to how animals, including humans, can be aware of their surroundings. The ecological approach to perception refers to a particular idea of how perception works and how it should be studied. The label " ecological " reflects two main themes that distinguish this approach from the establishment view. First, perception is an achievement of animal-environment systems, not simply animals (or their brains). What makes up the environment of a particular animal— cliffs or caves or crowds—is part of this theory of perception. Second, perception's main purpose is guiding activity, so a theory of perception cannot ignore what animals do. The kinds of activities that a particular animal does—how it eats and moves and mates—are part of this theory of perception. Including the environment and behavior as important parts of perceptual theory, rather than as afterthoughts, is clearly different from theories that start inside the eye (or the ear or the skin), but it is not necessarily controversial. Nonetheless, the ecological approach is considered controversial because of one central claim: Perception is direct. To understand the claim, and why some might consider it troubling, we have to contrast it with the more traditional view. Most scientists believe that perception begins with faulty input. For example, when objects in the world reflect light, the pattern of light that reaches the back of the eye (the part called the retina) has lost and distorted a lot of detail. The job of perception, then, becomes one of fixing the input and adding meaningful interpretations to it so that the brain can make an inference (or educated guess) about what caused that input in the first place. This traditional view is called indirect perception because the animal's awareness of the world is a result of these intermediary steps. A theory of direct perception, in contrast, argues that the intermediary steps are only needed if the