James Gibson and the Ecology of Perception

Nils Lindahl Elliot

Coenoscopics

Delome Publications
Bristol, England
2019
About this Text

The following text includes excerpts from Observing Wildlife in Tropical Forests, Vol. 1: A Geosemei-
otic Approach. The excerpts have been adapted for the Coenoscopics series, and are prefaced by a
short introduction that provides a context for the reading. You will find an introduction to the
overall Coenoscopics series in my academia.edu webpage.

You are welcome to download and keep a single copy of this text for your personal use, and
also to quote short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, as per legal and academic
conventions. Beyond such use, no part of the following work may be reproduced, distributed or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval sys-
tem, without express permission in writing from the author.

The full reference for the book is Lindahl Elliot, Nils (2019) Observing Wildlife in Tropical Forests,
Vol. 1: A Geosemeiotic Approach, rev. edit. (Bristol: Delome Publications). The reference for this
Coenoscopics document is Lindahl Elliot, Nils (2019), ‘James Gibson and the Ecology of Percep-
tion’, Coenoscopics Series, <https://independent.academia.edu/NilsLindahlElliot>[Accessed xx].

Copyright © 2019 Nils Lindahl Elliot. All Rights Reserved.

One of the difficulties of developing a critical account of observational practice is the relative
invisibility of observation as practice. When someone looks, they are generally not aware that
they are engaging in the process of looking, and the same may be said, with some caveats, of
listening, smelling, and even touching. Unless something quite rudely interrupts observational
habit – and even then – what are commonly described as the senses seem to hide behind them-
selves.
One way of accounting for this tendency is to suggest that observation, and with it perception,
are ‘direct’: they happen without recourse to thought, at least in the sense of a thought that is
mediated by representation and memory. Those who adopt the most egregiously reductionist
perspectives on the matter might well suggest that the directness of perception reflects ancient
evolutionary adaptations – it’s in our genes! – and with these, neurological processes that are as
automatic as they are mechanical. In one of the papers that make up this series I refer, for ex-
ample, to the research of Horace Barlow, a physiologist who conducted research relating to
visual perception with frogs between the 1950s and 70s. Barlow discovered that if a certain
stimulus was presented to ‘intact frogs’ (presumably frogs not dissected), they would ‘turn to-
wards the target and make repeated feeding responses consisting of a jump and a snap’.1 Ac-
cording to Barlow, this suggested that ‘a large part of the sensory machinery involved in a frog’s
feeding responses may actually reside in the retina rather than in mysterious “centres” that
would be too difficult to understand by physiological methods. The essential lock-like property
resides in each member of a whole class of neurons and allows the cell to discharge only the ap-
propriate key pattern of sensory stimulation’.2 This discovery led Barlow to engage in some-
thing of a leap of his own: he argued that, in general, ‘A description of that activity of a single
nerve cell which is transmitted to and influences other nerve cells and of a nerve cell’s re-
sponses to such influences...is a complete enough description for functional understanding of
the nervous system’; ‘[t]here is nothing else “looking at” or controlling this activity, which must
therefore provide a basis for understanding how the brain controls behaviour’.3 ‘[P]hysiological
experiments might thus be able to answer questions of “psychological interest”’.4
In the following pages I would like to consider the proposals of a scholar who believes in dir-
ect perception, but approaches it from a very different perspective from the one I have just de-
scribed. The scholar in question is James J. Gibson5 (1904-1979), the founder of a field known as
ecological psychology. At a time when cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and information theory
were dominating much of the research about perception (and cognition), Gibson bucked the
trend and developed an approach which was itself positivist, but which drew on the philosophy
of figures such as William James and James Holt, both of whom combined a hard-nosed empiri-
cism with the recognition that observers are active subjects, i.e. subjects who play a central role
in determining what they attend to, and how they do so.

1 Horace B. Barlow ‘Single Units and Sensation: A Neuron Doctrine For Perceptual Psychology?’, Perception 1
(1972), 371-394, p. 373.
2 Horace B. Barlow, ‘Single Units and Sensation’, p. 373.
3 Horace B. Barlow, ‘Single Units and Sensation’, p. 380.
4 Horace B. Barlow, ‘Single Units and Sensation’, p. 372.
5James J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950); James J. Gibson, The Senses
Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), and James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to
Visual Perception (London: Psychology Press, 2015 [1979]).
 The account that follows reflects my interest in developing a critical account of wildlife ob-
servation amongst tourists. Indeed, the account is an excerpt, adapted for the present context,
from Chapter 4 (‘Ecological Psychology and Direct Perception’) of my recently published Ob-
serving Wildlife in Tropical Forests, Volume 1, pp. 91-111 (for an introduction to that work see also
the entry in the book section of my personal webpage). However, I suggest that the pages that
follow may also be of interest to researchers interested in ecological psychology, in visual per-
ception more generally, and in critical approaches to observation.

Nils Lindahl Elliot

Bristol, England

4
James Gibson and the Ecology of Perception
Nils Lindahl Elliot

James Gibson adopts an arch empiricist perspective when it comes to visual perception, arguing
that there is a direct form of perception that does not involve memory or representation. What
somewhat tempers this empiricism is a new realist, and through it a Jamesian recognition that
subjects are active interpreters of sense data. As part of his analysis in the Principles of Psychology
regarding the nature of the innermost self – what he called the ‘self of all the other selves’ –
William James suggests that this self may be characterised as ‘the active element in all con-
sciousness; saying that whatever qualities a man’s [sic] feelings may possess, or whatever con-
tent his writing may include, there is a spiritual something in him which seems to go out to
meet these qualities and contents, whilst they seem to come in to be received by it’.6 As the
philosopher Josiah Royce, a friendly critic of William James puts it, for James ‘[e]xperience is
never yours merely as it comes to you. Facts are never mere data. They are data to which you
respond. Your experience is constantly transformed by your deeds. That this should be the case
is determined by the most essential characteristics of your consciousness’. ‘The simplest percep-
tion, the most elaborate scientific theory, illustrate how man never merely finds, but also always
cooperates in creating his world’.7
I will explain below how fundamental this perspective is for Gibson’s theory. First it should
be noted that, important as realist philosophy was to be for Gibson’s research, a rather more
practical set of experiences also played a key role in the development of Gibson’s theory of vis-
ual perception, which he first fully presented in 1950 in his first book, The Perception of the Visual
World.8 Like Wiener and Shannon (cf. Chapter 3), Gibson also contributed to the US war effort in
World War II. In Gibson’s case, he joined the Army Air Force, where he became the director of
the Motion Picture Research Unit in the Aviation Psychology Program. The purpose of this unit
was to develop visual aptitude tests for the screening of prospective pilots.9
By Gibson’s own account, this research led directly to a critique of a key part of the scaffold-
ing of what I have described as the discourse of retinalism10: the tendency to approach percep-
tion from the perspective of a Newtonian conception of ‘empty’ space. As Gibson explains,

6 William James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. I (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), p. 297.
7Josiah Royce, ‘William James and the Philosophy of Life’, in William James and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life
(New York: Macmillan, 1911), 3-48, p. 37.
8 James J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950).
9Julian Hochberg, ‘James Jerome Gibson: A Biographical Memoir’ (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of
Sciences, 1994), p. 154.
10As I explain in the previous chapter of Observing Wildlife in Tropical Forests, ‘The advocates of retinalism suggest
that, when it comes to explaining vision, most if not all of what we need to know may be researched by examining
the workings of those organs that are most directly involved in the perceptual process. In the case of vision, and of
organisms with single-chambered eyes such as we humans have, this entails examining the workings of the retina
as it relates to the central nervous system (hence my choice of name for the discourse). The underlying logic is a
version of the following: if we can explain how light reflected from an optic array is mapped onto receptor cells;
and if we can further explain how such mapping is transformed into a pattern which is transmitted to, and further
processed by the central nervous system (e.g. the sequence retina, optic nerve, brain), then we will have managed
to understand just how it is that we are able to detect relevant information, and represent it in patterns of neural
activity that translate what we see, or think we see.’ Nils Lindahl Elliot, Observing Wildlife in Tropical Forests, Vol. 1:
A Geosemeiotic Approach, rev. ed., (Bristol: Delome Publications, 2019), p. 94. The discourse of retinalism also occurs
in the context of any similar reductionism vis-a-vis any of the perceptual systems.
 James Gibson and the Ecology of Perception
Nils Lindahl Elliot, Coenoscopics

The space in which the pilot flies is not the abstract space of theories, nor the lines and
figures of the stereoscope, nor the space of the usual laboratory apparatus for studying
depth perception. It does not consist of objects at varying empty distances. It consists
chiefly of one basic object, a continuous surface of fundamental importance – the ground.
… The spatial situation which needs to be analysed, therefore, must involve the ground
and everything that it implies. Instead of calling it a space it would be better to call it a
world. [...] The conception of an empty space of three dimensions was a conception of
philosophers and physicists. It was appropriate for the analysis of the abstract world of
events defined by Newton. It was and still is of enormous value for analysis in the
physical sciences. But the fact that it simplifies such problems does not make it the best
starting point for the problem of visual perception. Space, time, points and instants are
useful terms, but not the terms with which to start the analysis of how we see, for no one
has ever seen them. […] The world with a ground under it – the visual world of surfaces
and edges – is not only the kind of world in which the pilot flies; it is the prototype of the
world in which we all live. In it, one can stand and move about.11

The last point begins to explain another aspect of Gibson’s critique: the criticism of what may
be described as retinalism’s immobility bias. Although Gibson had not yet worked out a precise
theory to explain this problem in 1950, his experiments with pilots revealed the flaws of adopt-
ing an approach that assumed an immobile observer. As Gibson puts it in his later work, ‘Ob-
servation implies movement, that is, locomotion with reference to the rigid environment, be-
cause all observers are animals and all animals are mobile. Plants to not observe but animals do,
and plants do not move about but animals do.’12 We might note in passing that Gibson switches
seamlessly between accounts of human, and beyond-human organisms in a manner that is
redolent of a positivist stance; the more important point for now is that Gibson was determined
to develop an alternative conception that not only moved away from Newtonian conceptions of
space, but also from immobile, or perhaps one should say immobilising conceptions of the ob-
server.
Following the publication of The Perception of the Visual World, Gibson spent the better part of
the next three decades refining what he eventually described as an ecological psychology of
perception, an approach that received its fullest treatment in The Ecological Approach to Visual
Perception (published in 1979, the year that Gibson died).13 The reference to ecology signals Gib-
son’s determination to link psychology to a burgeoning ecological turn across the biological sci-
ences.
In keeping with these developments, Gibson argued that it is not possible to understand per-
ception without understanding the environment in which perception occurs. As he puts it in The
Ecological Approach, ‘... it is often neglected that the words animal and environment make an in-
separable pair. Each term implies the other. No animal could exist without an environment sur-
rounding it. Equally, although not so obvious, an environment implies an animal (or at least an

11 James J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World, pp. 59-60. Italics added to the original.
12 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 65.
13 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (London: Psychology Press, 2015 [1979]).
6
 James Gibson and the Ecology of Perception
Nils Lindahl Elliot, Coenoscopics

organism) to be surrounded’.14 By this account, the environment is not the same as the physical
world, if by that one means the kind of space, time, matter, and energy conceived by physics. As
Gibson puts it, ‘We do not live in “space”’.15 While the physical world as conceived by the phys-
ical sciences goes from the extremes of atoms and their ultimate particles to light-years and be-
yond, ‘neither of these extremes is an environment. The size-level at which the environment ex-
ists is the intermediate one that is measured in millimeters and meters’,16 and it is this band that
the ecological theory of perception must be concerned with, albeit in a way that is itself different
from that assumed by the traditional physical sciences.
This is true in at least two ways. First, the relation between the units involves not the discrete
units conceived by reductionist approaches, but what Gibson describes as nesting. So, for exam-
ple, ‘canyons are nested within mountains; trees are nested within canyons; and cells are nested
within leaves. There are forms within forms both up and down the scale of size ... Things are
components of other things. They would constitute a hierarchy except that this hierarchy is not
categorical but full of transitions and overlaps.’17 As allied to the notion of the mutuality be-
tween organism and environment, this means that for the terrestrial environment, ‘there is no
special proper unit in terms of which it can be analyzed for once and for all’; the reductionist
inclination to find a fundamental ‘unit’ for this or that is misguided in so far as it leads the re-
searcher to overlook the fact that there are subordinate and superordinate units.18
Second, it is also the case that, from an ecological perspective, ‘the unit you choose for de-
scribing the environment depends on the level of the environment you choose to describe’.19
From this perspective, the problem is to describe things at the ecological level ‘because we all
behave with respect to things we can look at and feel, or smell and taste, and events we can lis-
ten to’.20 It follows that the unit one chooses for describing the environment depends on the lev-
el of the environment – and of course the organismic relation – one chooses to describe.21
Gibson’s critique of the motionlessness of retinalism is particularly pertinent in an ecological
context. Gibson notes that the motions of things in the environment are of a different order from
the motions of bodies in space. ‘So different, in fact, are environmental motions from those stud-
ied by Isaac Newton that it is best to think of them as changes of structure rather changes of po-
sition of elementary bodies, changes of form rather than of point locations, or changes in layout
rather than motions in the usual meaning of the term.’22 Then again, in so far as animals move
about, ‘the structure of an optic array at a stationary point of observation is only a special case
of the structure of an optic array at a moving point of observation’; normally, the ‘point of ob-
servation ... proceeds along a path of locomotion, and the “forms” of the array change as loco-

14 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 4.

15 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 27.
16 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 5.
17 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 5.
18 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 5.
19 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 5.
20 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 5.
21 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 5.
22 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 10.
7
 James Gibson and the Ecology of Perception
Nils Lindahl Elliot, Coenoscopics

motion proceeds.’23 One key consequence is that there is a play of change and non-change;
while some features of the optic array persist, others don’t. Where retinalism conflates the two
on the assumption of a static perspective (or static perspectivalism), Gibson distinguishes be-
tween the invariant, or relatively invariant structure of an environment, and the changing per-
spective structure.24
This is a key theoretical step for at least two reasons: on the one hand, Gibson conceives per-
ception as a process involving motions for which the cues are provided by the dynamic relation
between the invariant aspects and the changing perspective structure. A key, if not the key to
perception, Gibson suggests, is the ability to navigate, and to explore objects on the basis of an
understanding of what aspects or features are invariant, or relatively invariant.
On the other hand, Gibson’s theory of direct perception is contingent on the discovery of
what he describes as ‘affordances‘ of objects and surfaces, which are themselves premised, as
affordances, on the interplay of continuity and change. We can say provisionally that affordance
has to do with what an object or event can ‘offer’ the individual perceiver. However, in this con-
ception, an observer is not merely one who sees à la Marr [David Marr, the visual neuroscientist
who is the subject of Observing Wildlife’s previous chapter], but one who moves, and actively ex-
plores spaces on the basis of their known and relatively invariant qualities – yet this with the
purpose of discovering the unknown qualities of new or changing objects and spaces. We return
by this route to a Jamesian conception of the active subject.
In keeping with this approach, Gibson develops a theory of what he describes as the ambient
optic array viz., structured or ‘arranged‘ light that surrounds a position (and by implication,
any observer at that point), and which affords information about the surrounding environment.
On the basis of his ecological critique of Newtonian space, Gibson suggests that the environ-
ment is not simply a matter of so many objects ‘vectoring’ in empty space. In so far as there are
objects on the earth or in the sky, and in so far as those objects may be nested, as opposed to de-
tached or segregated. ‘... the environment is all of these various things – places, surfaces, lay-
outs, motions, events, animals, people, and artifacts that structure the light at points of observa-
tion’.25
If the concept of the ambient optic array problematises the application of Newtonian space to
perception, it is also premised on a rejection of the typically retinalist notion that perception is
primarily a matter of the stimulation of receptors in the eye. In one telling analogy, Gibson notes
that in a situation in which an observer finds itself in a fog-filled medium, there will still be
stimulation of the retina’s receptors; however, in so far as the light entering the pupil is the same
in all directions, the observer will not be able to focus on any one thing: there will be no retinal
image ‘because the light on the retina would be just as homogeneous as the ambient light out-
side the eye’, and so the possessor of the eye will not be able to fix the eye on anything.26 By
contrast, when there is what Gibson describes as structured ambient light, the environment speci-
fies information thanks to the way in which light is reflected by opaque surfaces, or emitted or
transmitted by luminous and semitransparent surfaces.

23 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 65.

24 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 66.
25 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 59. Italics added to the original.
26 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 47.
8
 James Gibson and the Ecology of Perception
Nils Lindahl Elliot, Coenoscopics

According to Gibson, the hypothetical case of a fog-filled medium demonstrates the differ-
ence ‘between the retina and the eye, that is, the difference between receptors and a perceptual
organ. Receptors are stimulated, whereas the organ is activated. There can be stimulation of a
retina by light without any activation of the eye by stimulus information. Actually, the eye is
part of a dual organ, one of a pair of mobile eyes, and they are set in a head that can turn, at-
tached to a body that can move from place to place’.27 Those organs, Gibson suggests, make up
a hierarchy that constitutes what he describes as a perceptual system.28
I will return to Gibson’s theory of perceptual systems below. First it is pertinent to explain
that the concept of the ambient optic array also rejects the retinalist – and it might be added,
characteristically positivist – notion that vision is either ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’: objective in so
far as it involves aspects such as retinal images, that are said to be completely independent of
the observer’s intentionality or purposiveness; or subjective in so far as it entails no more than a
purely individual and psychological response to the signals sent to the brain by the senses. In-
stead, Gibson proposes that an optic array is ambient at a point, meaning that the optic array is
observed from a point, or rather a place or set of places, in ecological space, ‘in a medium instead
of in a void’. ‘Whereas abstract space consists of points, ecological space consists of places – lo-
cations or positions’.29 However, and crucially, by this account observation must be at once sub-
jective and objective in so far as it starts from a particular place, but perceives structures that are
not themselves subjective, and this in ways that are not purely subjective.
To explain this last point, it is necessary to understand in more detail what is perhaps the
most interesting, but also the most controversial aspect of Gibson’s theory: his theory of affor-
dances, which I mentioned earlier, and with it his suggestion that perception is in fact direct
perception. As Gibson puts it, ‘I argue that the seeing of an environment by an observer existing
in that environment is direct in that it is not mediated by visual sensations or sense data. The
phenomenal visual world of surfaces, objects, and the ground under one’s feet is quite different
from the phenomenal visual field of color–patches ... I assert that the latter experience, the array
of visual sensations, is not entailed in the former. Direct perception is not based on the having of
sensations. The suggestion [is] that it is based on the pickup of information.’30 What is ‘picked
up’ is the affordance of whatever is observed.
Affordance is a neologism that Gibson coins in order to explain perception as a process that
discerns what an environment can offer the observer. ‘The affordances of the environment are
what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.’31 As an example,
Gibson refers to a terrestrial surface that affords support for some animals but not others. So, for
example, a hard surface able to carry the weight of an adult human will allow the adults to walk
or run along it, whereas the surface of at least a deep body of water will not. The strong, hard
surface is ‘stand-on-able’, permitting an upright posture for bipeds, and so ‘walk-on-able’ and

27 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 47. Italics in the original.
28 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 47.
29 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, pp. 58-59.
30James J. Gibson, ‘A Theory of Direct Visual Perception’, in A. Noe & E. Thompson (Eds.), Vision and Mind: Selected
Readings in the Philosophy of Perception (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 77–89, p. 77.
31 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 119.
9
 James Gibson and the Ecology of Perception
Nils Lindahl Elliot, Coenoscopics

‘run-over-able’32 (as opposed to, say, ‘sink-into-able’ like water; note though, that this last affor-
dance may be very different for, say, a pond skater [Gerridae spp.]).
Affordance applies not just to such macro-structural aspects of the environment, but to any
and all objects in the environment, be they attached or detached. An elongated object of a mod-
erate size and weight affords wielding, while a rigid object with a sharp dihedral angle, an
edge, affords cutting and scraping, and so is a knife.33 According to Gibson, some events also
have affordances; ‘[a] fire’, Gibson suggests, affords warmth on a cold night; it also affords be-
ing burnt. An approaching object affords either contact without collision or contact with colli-
sion; a tossed apple is one thing, but a missile is another’.34
From Gibson’s point of view, perception does not just involve the appraisal of affordance; in
some sense it is the appraisal of affordance. His theory flatly rejects the conventional notion that
we perceive those objects that we can represent, or as Gibson puts it, those objects whose quali-
ties or properties we can discriminate. Where traditional psychology assumes that objects are
composed of their qualities, Gibson argued that ‘what we perceive when we look at objects are
their affordances, not their qualities. We can discriminate the dimensions of difference if re-
quired to do so in an experiment, but what the object affords us is what we normally pay atten-
tion to. The special combination of qualities into which an object can be analyzed is ordinarily
not noticed’.35 Or as he also puts it, ‘An affordance is an invariant combination of variables’.36
Gibson clarifies that objects can have different affordances. A stone, for example, may serve
as a missile, a paperweight, a bookend, or a hammer. However, in his view, this does not con-
tradict the theory in so far as such affordances are all ‘consistent with one another’.37 ‘[T]he arbi-
trary names by which they are called do not count for perception. If you know what can be
done with a graspable detached object, what it can be used for, you can call it whatever you
please’. ‘The theory of affordances rescues us from the philosophical muddle of assuming fixed
classes of objects, each defined by its common features and then given a name’.38
As this account makes clear, Gibson’s approach to perception is very different from Marr’s
information processing. Marr’s information processing approach is what is known as an ‘indi-
rect’ theory of perception in so far as it assumes that representation plays a key role. By contrast,
for Gibson

Information ... refers to specification of the observer’s environment, not to specification of

the observer’s receptors or sense organs. The qualities of objects are specified by informa-
tion; the qualities of the receptors and nerves are specified by sensations. Information
about the world cuts right across the qualities of sense. [...] The term information cannot
have its familiar dictionary meaning of knowledge communicated to a receiver ... picking up
information is not to be thought of as a case of communicating. The world does not speak

32 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 119.

33 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 125.
34 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 94.
35 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 126.
36 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 126.
37 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 126.
38 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 126.
10
 James Gibson and the Ecology of Perception
Nils Lindahl Elliot, Coenoscopics

to the observer. Words and pictures convey information, carry it, or transmit it, but the in-
formation in the sea of energy around each of us, luminous or mechanical or chemical en-
ergy, is not conveyed. It is simply there. [...] Shannon’s concept of information applies to
telephone hookups and radio broadcasting in elegant ways but not, I think, to the first-
hand perception of being-in-the-world, to what the baby gets when first it opens its eyes.39

So what precisely is Gibson’s alternative? Gibson describes it as the theory of information

pickup, and it involves the play of the invariant and variable features of the ambient optic array,
and of the environment more generally: ‘...perceiving is a registering of certain definite dimen-
sions of invariance in the stimulus flux together with definite parameters of disturbance. The
invariants are invariants of structure, and the disturbances are disturbances of structure.’40
In the case of vision, the structure in question is that of the ambient optic array. For example,
as one’s head turns and surveys a scene, the occluding edge of the nose is an invariant which
helps to specify the self even as the sweeping motion over the ambient array specifies that one’s
head is turning, and as the acquisition and loss of texture at the edge of the field of view speci-
fies that there is motion of an object over the ground.41 In the context of perceptual events like
this, the process of pickup ‘is postulated to depend on the input-output loop of a perceptual sys-
tem’, but where such a loop does not depend on communication or on memory; ‘according to
pickup theory, information does not have to be stored in memory because it is always available’.
Returning to the earlier examples, one does not have to remember that the ground outside one’s
home is hard, and is ‘walk-able’; a similar point might be made about the affordance of every-
thing from toilet seats to kitchen knives to one’s front door keys.
I would now like to turn to what may be described as Gibson’s recorporealisation of vision. As
I began to suggest in Chapter 3, approaches like Marr’s have the paradoxical quality of decorpo-
realising vision. Their advocates may claim that they have moved beyond the mind-body dual-
ism, when in fact their theory excludes from perception all those parts of the body that are not
to do with the central nervous system, and with the organs deemed to be most directly involved
with one or another perceptual system, as per the discourse of retinalism. If this is true for rela-
tions within the body of the observer, it is even more true for the relation between a perceiving
body and its environment.
Gibson, by contrast, argues that if we cannot neatly separate off perception from the envi-
ronment in which perception takes place, we cannot neatly separate any one sense from the rest
of the organs, the rest of the body. As Gibson puts it, ‘We are told that vision depends on the
eye, which is connected to the brain. I ... suggest that natural vision depends on the eyes in the
head on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete
visual system.’42
In The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems43 (which Gibson published in 1966 and consti-
tutes something like a halfway point in the development of his theory), Gibson clarifies that it is

39 James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, pp. 231-232. Italics in the original.
40 James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 238.
41 James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 239.
42 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. xiii.
43 James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966).
11
 James Gibson and the Ecology of Perception
Nils Lindahl Elliot, Coenoscopics

not only a complete visual system that is at stake; there are other senses, or as Gibson describes
them, other perceptual systems. Once again, these systems are not to be confused with those as-
pects of perception that merely receive sensory inputs; when Gibson refers to systems he means
the sensory nerves and the brain, but also the perceptual organs acting in tandem with muscles
and other aspects of the body to enable an active detection and investigation of the information
provided by an environment. As Gibson explains, ‘It has always been assumed that the senses
were channels of sensation ... but the fact is that there are two different meanings of the verb to
sense, first, to detect something, and second, to have a sensation. When the senses are considered as
perceptual systems the first meaning of the term is being used.’44 The second meaning tends to
be associated with a relatively passive state: ‘When the senses are considered as channels of sen-
sation (and this is how the physiologist, the psychologist, and the philosopher have considered
them), one is thinking of the passive receptors and the energies that stimulate them, the sensi-
tive elements in the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin’45 – energies that are, by definition, in a
constant state of flux, and which in approaches such as Marr’s are thought to impinge on the
retina and to produce signals that determine a certain representation in the brain. By contrast,
Gibson’s approach focusses on the detection of what he describes as the ‘higher-order variables
of stimulus energy‘ – for example, ratios and proportions – that do not change.46 It is these in-
variant perceptions that the active observer gets despite varying sensations.47
On the basis of this approach, Gibson insists that the senses, or rather the perceptual systems,
are active and mutually imbricating, as opposed to being completely separate, and so ought to
be classified not as modes of conscious quality (as per more traditional psychological approach-
es) but as modes of activity.48 The modes in question are 1) the basic orienting system, with a
mode of attention geared to general orientation; 2) the auditory system, geared to listening; 3)
the haptic system, geared to touching; 4) the taste-smell system, geared to smelling and tasting;
and 5) the visual system, geared to looking. A key conceptual displacement is that, while the
channels of sensation are not subject to modification by learning – as Gibson puts it, the sense
data are by definition given – the perceptual systems are amenable to learning.49 ‘It would be
expected that an individual, after practice, could orient more exactly, listen more carefully, touch
more acutely, smell and taste more precisely, and look more perceptively than he could before
practice’,50 and indeed Gibson notes that this insight is born out by abundant psychological re-
search.
Having provided an overview of Gibson’s approach, what might its implications be for this
study? Unlike the proposals developed by Edward O. Wilson (cf. Chapter 2, on Wilson’s ‘Bio-
philia Hypothesis’), and David Marr (cf. Chapter 3, on Marr’s visual neuroscience), Gibson has
much to offer a theoretical approach to wildlife observation. Here I would highlight three as-
pects: First, unlike Marr, Gibson describes, rightly in my view, the need to regard observation

44 James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, p. 1.

45 James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, p. 3.
46 James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, p. 3.
47 James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, p. 3.
48 James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, p. 49.
49 James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, p. 51.
50 James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, p. 51.
12
 James Gibson and the Ecology of Perception
Nils Lindahl Elliot, Coenoscopics

(or what he more often describes as perception) as a process that entails at once a physiology, an
intentional or purposive subject, and an environment. Anyone studying wildlife observation in
a tropical forest will recognise the importance of this seemingly obvious displacement vis-a-vis
retinalist perspectives; it must be true that observation is at least as much a matter of what is ob-
served, as it is of a certain physiology, as it is an active observational process. While Marr would
presumably accept this point in general, his theory focusses entirely on visual/neurological ac-
tivities considered from a computational perspective, and as a matter of an interface between
channels of sensation (the eyes) and the central nervous system.
Second, where both Marr and Wilson adopt perspectives that take for granted the centrality
of representation and memory, Gibson suggests in sharp contrast that, at least in the case of per-
ception sensu stricto, neither ‘pictures’ nor ‘storage’ really matter. There is, according to Gibson,
something like a pre-representational, or better yet an a-representational process of the kind that
is best illustrated by our relation the ground each time we take a step. Unless there is something
wrong with the basic orienting system, or the nature of the ground changes noticeably, our per-
ception of the ground is a matter of a learned, but thereafter a more or less automatic presump-
tion of affordance. This is the aspect of Gibson’s approach that I will be most interested in prob-
lematising, but not before recognising that, at the very least, some aspects of the way in which
people observe wildlife (or the environments in which the wildlife are observed) must entail
something very much like a relation based on affordance, if not direct perception. If nothing
else, so many of the activities that we engage are based on a mixture of bodily and more-than-
bodily habit that it must be true that an entirely rationalist perspective – e.g. playing on
Descartes’ famous formulation, ‘I think, therefore I perceive’ – must be mistaken.
James Gibson’s proposals regarding an ecological approach to the psychology of learning
bring me to a third implication: while Gibson would certainly agree with Wilson (and any other
adaptationist biologist) that the human physiology has evolved, and poses species-specific con-
straints particularly on the level of the structure of the senses and the perceptual organs, his ap-
proach does not have to appeal to anything like universal epigenetic rules. On the contrary, and
very much in keeping with a Jamesian empiricism (or what we might also describe as active
empiricism), a learning process occurs anew with each individual. Each individual acquires a
knowledge of affordances via the trial and error that begins from the earliest childhood, and
continues throughout that individual’s lifetime. It is to be deduced that this kind of dynamic
also applies to the perception of beyond-human animals; there is, in this sense, no need to ap-
peal to a ‘mysterious’ (Barlow, passim), and by positivism’s own standards, unresearchable ‘epi-
genetic rule’ to explain why we learn to avoid or otherwise relate to certain creatures. Eleanor
Gibson, who worked closely with James Gibson in the development of ecological psychology,
describes this kind of learning process as a matter of perceptual learning.51
There are a number of other more specific aspects of Gibson’s theory that might well be use-
ful in a study about wildlife observation and I will refer to some of these in the course of later
chapters. For now, I would like to problematise two aspects of Gibson’s approach: his theory of
direct perception, and his naturalistic conception of environment.

51See Eleanor J. Gibson, Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development (New York: Century Psychology Series,
1969). See also Eleanor J. Gibson and Anne D. Pick, An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning and Development
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
13
 James Gibson and the Ecology of Perception
Nils Lindahl Elliot, Coenoscopics

Earlier, I noted that Gibson was influenced by the New Realism, a philosophical movement
that took up William James’ empiricist philosophy. This is evident across several aspects of Gib-
son’s theory, but it is perhaps most obvious in his attempt to move away from an indirect theory
of perception. Gibson is clear that representation has its purposes, but not when it comes to per-
ception ‘itself’. If this is the case, Gibson must formulate an alternative, and he does so via the
theory of affordances, and the related notion of the ‘pickup’ of information. While the former
aspect is clearly described and formulated, the pickup of information is not as clearly formulat-
ed, beyond the suggestion that, as Gibson puts it, ‘perceiving is a registering of certain definite
dimensions of invariance in the stimulus flux together with definite parameters of
disturbance’.52 To be fair, there is much to be said about Gibson’s critique of linear, and mathe-
matised conceptions of communication (e.g. Shannon’s, and by extension, Marr’s and Wilson’s),
but in my view there is no equally precise, and well-formulated alternative with respect to in-
formation pickup. It is no coincidence that, by the time of The Ecological Approach to Visual Per-
ception, Gibson’s last work, Gibson is increasingly referring not to information pickup (or the
pickup of information), but simply to pickup.
Again, it might be argued that affordance, for which there is an explanation, tells us all that
we need to know about direct perception. But the theory of affordance is not without its own
issues, and indeed one of its main problems can be illustrated via the repurposing of objects.
While Gibson recognises that one same object can have different affordances, he argues that this
does not contradict the theory in so far as differing affordances will nevertheless all be ‘consis-
tent with one another’.53 However, it seems to me that the argument of consistency negates or
minimises the enormity of the challenge posed to Gibson’s approach by, say, the repurposing of
familiar objects.
Consider, for example, the following scenario. Someone needs to move several large boxes
out of their house, but it’s a windy day and the front door keeps slamming shut. They decide to
use as a doorstop an old desktop computer that is sitting next to the front door (the old comput-
er was supposed to be taken to the local recycling centre, but a busy schedule has kept the own-
er from doing so). A part of this process, which clearly involves a multimodal (multichannel)
form of perception, fits well with the kind of logic described by Gibson: having learned from
previous experience that the computer is quite heavy, and that it has features that keep it from
sliding about (e.g. rubber feet), the person will know intuitively that it will ‘do the trick’ and
hold the door open, despite the gusts of wind. In Gibson’s terms, the computer has the requisite
affordance, an affordance that is, again in his terms, ‘consistent’ at least with the machine’s
physical characteristics.
What Gibson’s theory leaves out – or rather, tries to separate off – is the role that an ‘indirect’
calculation, itself impromptu, plays in this kind of everyday activity. That calculation, as calcu-
lation, must entail a combination of memory and representation. The person only knows from
past experience that the computer is heavy, and so must remember this. This entails, in Gibson’s
own terms, ‘storage’. And if it entails ‘storage’, which is really to say memory, then it must sure-
ly also involve some kind, some degree of representation ‘in’ the mind, however much the ob-
ject and its affordance are also beyond the mind. Can we really separate off, as Gibson suggests,

52 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 238. Italics in the original.
53 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 126.
14
 James Gibson and the Ecology of Perception
Nils Lindahl Elliot, Coenoscopics

the ‘direct perception’ of an object such as the computer, from contextual calculations of the
kind I have just illustrated?
As part of his notion of pickup, Gibson is keen to emphasise the flow of energy, and certainly
he is right to do so over and against the reductionist and immobilising analogies favoured by
retinalist approaches. But aside from the possibility that references to ‘flows of energy’ pose
similar issues to the notion of ‘empty space’,54 the very idea of a flow suggests a more general
way of posing the question I asked above: can Gibson really deny that recollection and repre-
sentation must also be an integral aspect of that selfsame flow of energy?
To be clear, I am not arguing that a ‘thought process‘ or ‘representation’, conceived in the ab-
stract, must necessarily guide perception – if there is some kind of guidance, it is certainly not
inevitably a voluntary or conscious one. That would be a return to the kind of rationalism that
Gibson rightly critiques. Rather, I am questioning the obverse movement, which either shuts
out, or simply adds representation as a kind of afterthought. To say that we can only really per-
ceive what we can imagine is as problematic as suggesting that what we perceive has nothing to
do with what we can imagine. Doubtless Gibson is right to point out that in some situations,
representation – certainly representation conceived along Saussurean lines (cf. Chapter 5) – has
little to do with affordance. But that is very different from effectively opposing perception to
semiotic activity, tout court; doing so reveals the extent to which, despite numerous differences
vis-a-vis Wilson and Marr, Gibson himself remains very much in the thrall of the rules of phe-
nomenalism and nominalism (cf. Part 1). In so far as he also is an advocate of something like
consilience, then Gibson too, may described as a positivist.
In the perspective that I will develop in this study, there must always be a sense of affordance,
in the semiotic connotation of sense as meaning, and not just in the connotation of detection.
But of course, on occasion that sense may be proven wrong by phenomena which are either not
semiotic (at least not, symbolically semiotic, cf. Part 2), or not immediately experienced as being
semiotic. This is, we shall see, an important distinction which may ultimately spare the re-
searcher from having to choose between direct and indirect theories of perception.
I would like to conclude this chapter by saying something about Gibson’s naturalistic con-
ception of environment. Before doing so I would like to reiterate how welcome Gibson’s fore-
grounding of the environment is; given this study’s focus on wildlife observation, Gibson’s de-
velopment of an ecological approach is a particularly felicitous one. Amongst many other as-
pects, the critique of ‘empty’ space chimes with the social theorist Henri Lefebvre’s critique of
the double illusion55 which I will present in Part 4.
There is, nevertheless, at least one problem with Gibson’s conceptualisation of the nexus be-
tween perception and environment: while Gibson certainly acknowledges that a space can be,
and often is in some sense constructed by human activity, he makes little or no allowance for the
possibility that that selfsame constructive activity might fundamentally alter perception. Both
James and Eleanor Gibson would agree that what they describe as perceptual learning can and

54Gibson critiques, rightly in my view, any effort to simply transfer the conceptual baggage of physics to the study
of perception; yet this is arguably what he does when he refers to flows of ‘energy’, some of whose invariant
aspects are ‘picked up’ by observers.
55Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991 [1974]),
pp. 27-29.
15
 James Gibson and the Ecology of Perception
Nils Lindahl Elliot, Coenoscopics

will occur in any new environment. However, this kind of learning can only take into account
what might be described as the proximal environment, and indeed, those aspects of that envi-
ronment that have physical presentation: surfaces, edges, objects with a certain texture, events
with what are themselves relatively invariant aspects, and the like.
By contrast, when it comes to remembered environments, or environments generated by vir-
tual means – be they actual physical spaces, or environments represented by pictures or via the
moving image – Gibson goes so far as to state that a drawing (a term that he uses in a very gen-
eral sense that includes pictures) ‘does not have ecological validity’.56 While Gibson is referring
to the use of drawings in psychological experiments, the implication is clear: drawings are infe-
rior, perceptually speaking, to the real McCoy of perception. This is a stance that is echoed in
the final chapter of An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, which considers motion pictures.
In it Gibson suggests that ‘the art of film-editing should be guided by knowledge of how events
and the progress of events are naturally perceived’.57 Here again, the aesthetic and ethical impli-
cations are clear: even though motion pictures – or as Gibson prefers to call them, the progressive
pictures – yield ‘something closer to natural visual perception’,58 they are still inferior, percep-
tually speaking, to actual, as in immediate perceptual experience.
In the introductory chapter, I noted that the visitors with whom I conducted ethnographic
research on Barro Colorado seemed surprised by the gap between the represented space con-
structed by wildlife TV programmes (and other nature media), and the space of in situ wildlife
observation in an actual tropical forest. Gibson’s theory would certainly help to explain some of
the differences across the two contexts, and so provide a critical perspective on what I have de-
scribed as dynamics of transmediation. The problem is that Gibson cannot account theoretically
for the equally important fact that, if there was disillusion amongst some tourists over the dif-
ferences, this was precisely because the nature media representations helped to generate expec-
tations. Not just ‘general’ expectations in the sense of ‘ideas’ or vague impressions, but very
concrete observational expectations at once borne by, and taken from the techniques of observa-
tion deployed by both photographic and cinematographic media. The conclusion has to be that
there was, in the Gibson’s own terms, perceptual learning – but via the media. If this is the case,
then surely one cannot claim so categorically that pictures, be they drawings or progressive pic-
tures, ‘lack ecological validity’. More importantly, this issue suggests another reason for assum-
ing that James Gibson’s decision to exclude memory and representation from perception is mis-
taken. If representations can affect how one perceives the world, it is difficult to argue that rep-
resentations have nothing to do with the perception of the world.

© Copyright 2019, Nils Lindahl Elliot. All Rights Reserved.

56 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 256.

57 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 288.
58 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 288.
16