ABSTRACT
James Gibson’s work in the field of perception seems to the author of the greatest importance for people's understanding of that phenomenon. The parallel between the structural properties of the retinal stimulation and those of the visual field implied a resuscitation of what used to be called the ‘constancy hypothesis’ in a new dress; it gets application in relation to the visual field but not to the visual world. The pattern of stimuli do not determine how the people see the world; there may be many other factors that have a part to play in that – such as, attention, learning and background experience, even personality factors. Ecological optics, as the author understand that notion, has no reference to any aspects of experience. It is, Gibson says, ‘put together from parts of physical optics, illuminating engineering, ecology and perspective geometry’. It involves the idea of points of observation for which there are invariant structures in the changing optic array.
