ABSTRACT
Concerning James J. Gibson’s eventual opposition to mediational explanations of visual perception, his discovery of a psychophysical relation of retinal-phenomenal curvature was one instigating force in the genesis of his general psychophysics of visual perception. The major point of disagreement between Gibson and traditional empiricist psychology within the just cited publications was Gibson’s employment of the hypothesis of a spatial framework. The series of adaptation studies that Gibson would conduct became a “crucial experiment” in how it effected his theoretical perspective. Although any one degree of curvature of a line in the retinal image can be correlated with different curvatures of phenomenal lines, Gibson contended that there existed a flexible psychophysical correspondence of the phenomenal and physical continuums of curvature. Conceived of as a projective transformation of the physical world, the retinal image should contain “ordinal variables” that are mathematically related to the three-dimensional physical world.
