ABSTRACT
Although it is obvious that many psychological processes begin with sensory inputs and perceptual integration, psychological theories differ greatly in the extent to which they attend to perception. On the one hand, radically behavioristic theories take perceptual processes pretty much for granted. Though they are extremely environmentalist in orientation, their environments are reduced to simple physical stimuli; how organisms, whose behaviors are shaped by environmental events (e.g., reinforcement contingencies), process those events is of little, if any, concern. On the other hand, there are psychological theories (e.g., classical Gestalt theory) which focus almost exclusively onperception, and take it for granted that behaviors appropriate to prevailing perceptual states will be forthcoming. In between are those theories which try to be comprehensive and to deal in a balanced manner with the full range of processes that are presumed to underlie the behavior, and experience, of complex organisms. The contemporary scene is, in fact, beginning to be dominated by theoretical approaches characterized by the phrase, "information processing," or by the adjective, "cognitive" (see Dember, 1974).
