Untitled

Page 1

Evaluate Gibson's theory of perception. [16]

Research support for the theory comes from Wraga et al. It was found that when participants, who were affected by the 2D Muller Lyer illusion, were able to move around a 3D representation of said illusion they no longer were affect by it. This shows that the individuals had access to the useful infomation to accurately percieve the illusion, supporting the importance of biological motion.

Gibson's theory strongly suports the argument of perception being the result of nature. This is because it is suggested that we percieve due to direct visual stimuli without any top down processing. This is supported by Gibson and Walk with the Visual cliff experiment as it was found that babies avoided the deep side of the visual cliff due to innate depth perception. This supports Gibson's theory as the babies were using direct visual infomation and motion parralax to percieve the depth of the visual cliff.

Gibson's theory has also had real application with technology. Sahin found that individuals have been able to make autonomous robots that understand the meanings of objects due to the affordances that tehy communcate. This shows that Gibson's theory has had real application within wider society.

The theory also has key strengths. It provides an ecological explanation for perception as it explains perception within natural settings and suggests real life mechanisms that we use to percieve such as invariances. This is good as it can therefore explain real life perception and be used to furhter develop pur understanding of how we percieve in our natural enviroment.

However the model does have flaws. For example it cannot explain findings such as that of Bruner et al who found that individuals saw oppositely coloured playing cards to be purple. The theory cannot explain this occurance and therefore it is likley that there is top down processing involved with perception; weakening the validity of Gibsons claim that direct perception does not require top down processing.

Gregory proposed a conflicting explanation; he suggested that perception is in fact a top down process that uses congnitive processing. He suggested that against Gibson's claims, the infomation in the optic array is insufficient and needs further processing to fill in the blank