ABSTRACT

One of the central questions in the study of perception concerns the origins of the people perceptual abilities. The empiricist view generally describes perception in terms of information processing. One extreme view (nativism) is that they are all inherited and another (empiricism) is that they are all learned. Gibson was clear that perceptual theory should be concerned with the real world, and believed that it is not useful to analyze perceptual problems in terms of stimuli and retinal images. As a pilot prepares to land an aircraft, the point toward which the plane is heading appears stationary while everything else in the visual field 'flows' away from it. The computational approach to the analysis of perception takes as its starting point a set of questions about the kind of information processing a perceptual system must carry out in order to accomplish tasks such as perceptual discrimination and visually guided action..