ABSTRACT
William H. Warren Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown University, USA
Dave Lee’s great contribution to perceptual psychology has been to take James
Gibson’s conceptual insights about the information for perception and action
and to develop them theoretically. Prior to Dave’s paper in 1974, this had only
been attempted once before, by Gibson, Olum, & Rosenblatt (1955), who
formalized optic flow but did not invert the equations to derive new
informational variables. It was not until Dave published his first and most
complete description of the optic flow field (Lee, 1974, 1976) that our discipline
had a mathematical formulation of the spatiotemporal information available for
controlling behavior1. The 1974 paper can be read as the kernel for Dave’s
career, and indeed an entire field of visual-motor control, for it encompasses
initial analyses of the information for the direction of self-motion, the 3D layout
of surfaces, relative size, time-to-contact, the control of braking, and even the
notion of body-scaled information. It’s all in there.
