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What Is Direct Perception?
Mary McMahon
Mary McMahon
Direct perception is a theory arguing that sensory perception is the direct result of information from the surrounding environment. This conflicts with indirect theories, which argue that people use inferences and beliefs to make sense of their sensory experiences. These topics are a subject of lively debate in some corners of academia, as they touch upon both psychology and philosophy, where understanding how people perceive the world around them is a subject of much interest. A noted scholar in the field is James Gibson, who put forward a strong argument for direct perception in the middle of the 20th century.
Sensory information comes from vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste, all of which provide information about the surrounding environment. Supporters of direct perception believe this is all the necessary information for understanding visual stimuli. This is a bottom-up approach, where people build knowledge about an environment from what they directly perceive. In the indirect hypothesis, researchers argue that people use a combination of a top-down and bottom-up approach, using both what they experience and inferences from previous experiences to collect information about their environment.
In an example of direct perception, a person standing in a library would have sensory feedback providing information about the books, shelves, and other furniture. A sensation of depth would be created by phenomena like superpositioning, where some shelves are in front of others. This could provide information about the depth and size of the library, as could feedback like varying size. The observer’s vision would show a set of identical shelves decreasing in size. Rather than assuming that some are smaller and others are larger, the observer would know that some are further away because of the contextual information about them.
Critics of direct perception argue that this view of perception is too simplistic, and does not account for the complexities of human perception. One topic of discussion is the argument from illusion, which brings up the point that sometimes people perceive things that are not there, or mis-perceive sensory information. These perceptual tricks suggest that something more than simple feedback from the environment is going on; someone who sees pink elephants dancing in a conga line in the middle of the woods, for instance, is not actually seeing them. Clearly some cognitive processing is involved, which explains why the brain can be tricked with sensory stimuli that aren’t there, or with misleading sensory information.
Such theories are difficult to test in a controlled fashion because perception involves processes in the brain that are not easy to quantify. Using imaging studies, for example, researchers can see which areas of the brain activate when people are exposed to stimuli. They cannot, however, see what these brain regions are doing when they become more active.
Mary McMahon
Ever since she began contributing to the site several years ago, Mary has embraced the exciting challenge of being a TheHealthBoard researcher and writer. Mary has a liberal arts degree from Goddard College and spends her free time reading, cooking, and exploring the great outdoors.
Learn more...
Mary McMahon
Ever since she began contributing to the site several years ago, Mary has embraced the exciting challenge of being a TheHealthBoard researcher and writer. Mary has a liberal arts degree from Goddard College and spends her free time reading, cooking, and exploring the great outdoors.
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Discussion Comments
@fify-- But doesn't the fact that hallucinations do in fact occur actually support that direct perception is a result of additional brain processes? It means that we don't necessarily have to receive sensory information to perceive things. We can also perceive them through other ways.
Our brain is far more complex than any of us know and it's possible that we can't really prove any of it. At least not with our current knowledge about the brain.
@Mor-- I agree, the point about hallucinations (audio or visual) just complicates things. I don't think anything can be proven if we also consider hallucinations.
I saw an excellent program on TV the other day. It was about perception and sight, but argued that there was a genetic factor involved.
The scientists who were interviewed argued that people do not perceive things the same way. We may look at the same thing but see it or understand it differently. And the argument about why that is was that we have genetic information that causes us to perceive things in that way.
For example, a few studies were done in regards to color in different cultures and the studies showed that different cultures actually see colors differently. They even categorize and label them differently. Some cultures are more sensitive to certain colors than others.
If we think about it, the information in our genes are basically just the accumulative experiences of our ancestors and what they learned. So I completely support the argument about direct perception that our experiences affect how we perceive sensory information.
@Fa5t3r - If you're going to take that kind of approach, even touch isn't a direct experience of an object, because of the way that atoms work. You might feel like you're in direct contact with something but it's actually more like your atoms floating very, very close to its atoms.
I don't think this really should influence whether direct perception is right or wrong, but I think that it is too simplistic. Humans are creatures of the mind and I believe perception is strongly influenced by that rather than just by the senses.
@Mor - The fact that we can sometimes see hallucinations seems like fairly strong proof that the direct perception theory is wrong though. Because it proves that you can perceive things that aren't being fed into your experience directly by your senses.
And that's just an extreme example. If you think about what happens when you walk down the street you grew up on, I don't see how anyone can think that our perception of reality entirely consists of direct sensory information. It's augmented by memory and emotion, and influenced by what we expect to see or experience.
This isn't even getting into the fact that even our senses are just interpretations of the world. We aren't actually 'seeing' objects in the way our brain makes us think we are. We're interpreting the light that has bounced off those objects. Touch is probably the closest we can get to directly experiencing something.
It confuses me when they bring hallucinations into the argument. I'm not sure if that should disprove the idea of direct perception or not. I mean, I imagine you simply wouldn't consider them to be reality, so they have nothing to do with your senses or how they work. You might be tricked into thinking that your eyes are perceiving the pink elephants, but in reality they aren't doing that. So it's kind of like someone putting red glass in front of your eyes. It might change what you see, but it doesn't actually change the mechanisms at work.
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