Psychsciencenotes

So far, all the traditional accounts of perception have been rejected. Perception is not based on sensations detected by the retina, enriched by memories or processed into experience. Meaning is not simply associations from the past, nor innately given. In this chapter, Gibson brings together things we have already reviewed to lay out the theory of specifying information, and...

A recent preprint (Friedrich, 2026) describes the notion of analog computing, and proposes that it be taken seriously as a form of computation that might show up in cognition (alongside, not necessarily replacing, digital computation). He lays out the basi...

There are two approaches to formalising Gibson's notion of affordances. The first is to treat them as

Gibson turns his attention now to two major forms of behaviour, locomotion and manipulation, and discusses the optical basis for the control of these action. He considers the visual information available in these tasks, and how these can be used to control the behaviours, without appeal to a central controller (such as the brain). In this chapter Gibson proposes that these an...