Perceiving, its component stream of perceptual experience, and Gibson's ecological approach

Abstract

Gibson's theory nearly explicitly distinguishes the activity or process of perceiving from its component stream of perceptual experience (awareness). An activity of perceiving is a total process of a perceiver's using a perceptual system to perceive something in the environment or of himself or herself in that environment. An activity of perceiving includes, inter alia, an obtained stimulus energy flux at the respective receptors, as well as a stream of perceptual experience (awareness) which proceeds at certain brain centers of the respective perceptual system. Obtaining stimulation, though this be highly structured and nomically specific to environmental properties, is not the having of perceptual experience (awareness); in addition to information pick-up, there must take place, in the nervous system, extraction of informational features (invariants and variants) of the stimulus energy flux. But the Gibsonian Lombardo argues that perceptual awareness is not a brain process; it occurs, rather, at the ecological level of organization. In effect, this contradicts Gibson's theory, which holds (a) that information pick-up, but not extraction, occurs at the interface between perceiving and environment, and (b) perceptual experience (awareness), in contrast to perceiving, is not publicly observable, as it would be by definition if it occurred at the ecological level of organization.