Ecological Psychology

ISSN: 1040-7413 (Print) 1532-6969 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/heco20

The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems:

The Revolutionary Ideas of Gibson's 1966 Book,
50 Years Later - Part 1

Pablo Covarrubias, Ángel Andrés Jiménez, Felipe Cabrera & Alan Costall

To cite this article: Pablo Covarrubias, Ángel Andrés Jiménez, Felipe Cabrera & Alan
Costall (2017) The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems: The Revolutionary Ideas
of Gibson's 1966 Book, 50 Years Later - Part 1, Ecological Psychology, 29:2, 69-71, DOI:
10.1080/10407413.2017.1297680

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10407413.2017.1297680

Published online: 13 Apr 2017.

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Download by: [Cornell University Library] Date: 05 July 2017, At: 05:19
ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY
2017, VOL. 29, NO. 2, 69–71
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10407413.2017.1297680

The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems: The Revolutionary

Ideas of Gibson’s 1966 Book, 50 Years Later - Part 1

Pablo Covarrubiasa, Angel Andres Jimeneza, Felipe Cabreraa, and Alan Costallb
a
Centro de Investigacion en Conducta y Cognicion Comparada, Universidad de Guadalajara; bDepartment of
Psychology, University of Portsmouth

ABSTRACT
This editorial introduces the first part of a 2-part special issue of
Ecological Psychology dedicated to James J. Gibson’s 1966 book, The
Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, which presents many
revolutionary ideas that are important not only for the study of
perception but also for the science of psychology in general including
the rejection of the mechanistic and dualistic stimulus-response
formula (cf. Dewey, 1896), the rejection of sensation-based theories of
perception, and the insistence that the unit of investigation and
explanation is the mutual relation between people and other animals
and their environments.

The importance of a scientist’s work may be weighed by the influence of his or her
contributions to the scientific community. This is sometimes a case of direct influence
upon students or colleagues, whereas at other times it may be less direct. Probably one
of the ways a scientist may have the broadest impact is when his book, discovered on
the shelves of an overseas university library, inspires a group of scholars to undertake a
research program in response. In our case, James J. Gibson’s 1966 book, The Senses
Considered as Perceptual Systems, has indeed profoundly influenced our research
activity. Perhaps in this way the book’s purpose is fulfilled, and its last sentence has
taken on a life of its own: “This book is dedicated to all persons who want to look for
themselves” (p. 321).
This special issue of Ecological Psychology is a tribute to James J. Gibson and in particular
to this book, which of all his intellectual works most radically established his foundation of
ecological psychology as a field. The idea of convening papers from distinguished ecological
psychologists to discuss Gibson’s 1966 theoretical contributions has become this two-part
special issue, which aims to honor Gibson’s work and to show the longevity and wide reach
of his influence 50 years later.
Gibson’s 1966 book, the second of three (Gibson, 1950, 1966, 1979/1986), presents a revo-
lutionary theory of perception, and its pioneering ideas are relevant not only for that study
but also for the science of psychology and for direct-realism epistemology (Gibson, 1967). In

CONTACT Pablo Covarrubias [email protected] Departamento de Comunicacion y Psicologıa, Centro

Universitario de la Cienega, Universidad de Guadalajara, Universidad 1115, 47820 Ocotlan, Jalisco, Mexico.
© 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
70 P. COVARRUBIAS ET AL.

The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966), Gibson considered sensory impressions
as merely incidental. That is, perception is direct, not mediated by sensations. He rejected the
view of perception as a passive process; instead he proposed that animals actively seek infor-
mation through exploratory movements. Although Gibson continues to be misrepresented in
the textbooks as a pure stimulus-response theorist, the 1966 book represents his fundamental
challenge to that still influential schema. In this book, Gibson also developed the concept of
invariants, proposing their detection as the basis for the organism’s perception and learning.
He questioned the opposition between distal and proximal stimulation for perception as well
as the traditional sharp separation between perceiving, remembering, and expecting.
In the foreword to Gibson’s 1966 book, Leonard Carmichael wrote, “This novel and chal-
lenging book makes a most important contribution to the assumptions underlying all scien-
tific concern with living organisms, especially human beings,” and concluded by asserting
that “certainly not all professional students of mental life will agree with all the conclusions
of this book. But it will be a brave psychologist indeed who feels he can afford to be ignorant
of what is said in it” (p. vi).
Edwin Boring, another very well respected member of the American psychological estab-
lishment, praised Gibson’s 1966 book not only for its originality but also for its provocation:
Certainly, Gibson’s volume is the most original work we have had in the field of sense-percep-
tion for a long, long time. … The details invite dissent, and the progress of civilization depends,
of course, on the interaction of dissents. (Boring, 1967, p. 154)

Over the last 50 years, the book’s influence has steadily grown. Research programs around
the world have been created, and prestigious researchers continue to accept the challenge that
ecological psychology proposed as an alternative to orthodox psychology. Prominent scholars
contributing to the first part of this two-part special issue discuss insights into Gibson’s 1966
book with their four pieces constituting further development of Gibson’s ideas.
Authoring the opening article are H. A. Sedgwick and Barbara Gillam, who make a critical
analysis of the highly influential but taken-for-granted idea of modularity in the study of
visual space perception. According to the authors, the modularity approach, as opposed to
Gibson’s (1966) ideas, fails to consider perception as an active process. They propose that
surfaces and the relations between them are fundamental to providing elements for structur-
ing visual space perception.
A review article by Claudia Carello and Michael T. Turvey summarizes the research on
haptic perception derived from Gibson’s work. The authors emphasize that Gibson’s (1966)
analysis of extracting invariants through dynamic touch had implications for the further
notion of affordances developed in his 1979/1986 book. The authors introduce the dynamic
systems approach to analyzing processes for detecting haptic information. Carello and Tur-
vey rightly note that this was just the start of further theoretical and empirical research that
the Gibson 1966 book would inspire over the next 50 years.
The issue continues with a piece by Harry Heft, who points out that Gibson’s 1966 book
emphasizes the importance of sociocultural issues for a theory of perception. He develops
Gibson’s assumption that social interaction among humans (or animals) provides perceptual
information and is part of a behavioral loop. Using the postal system as an example, Heft
proposes that this system should be understood as a social structure, the awareness of which
is real (not a mental representation) because of its grounding in a complex set of social
practices from everyday life.
 ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY 71

Finally, Vicente Raja, Zvi Biener, and Anthony Chemero focus on the idea of embodi-
ment underlying Gibson’s approach. In the history of modern science authors such as Kep-
ler, Descartes, and Newton departed from Aristotelian teleological and intentional
explanations toward those based upon interaction between bodies. This scientific revolution
revealed an embodied approach situated in the physical-mathematical domain. And in the
psychological domain, along with these scientists, is joined the name of James J. Gibson.
In summary, the four pieces presented here show the influence of Gibson’s 1966 book,
The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, on the study of visual space perception, haptic
perception, social issues, and embodied cognition, 50 years later.

Acknowledgments
We thank Richard Schmidt, the editor of Ecological Psychology, for his generous support and guidance
throughout the editorial process. We also acknowledge the reviewers of each of the papers, who kindly
provided accurate and timely feedback for shaping them into their current form. Our additional
appreciation goes to Ecological Psychology for supporting this special issue.

References
Boring, E. G. (1967). The senses considered as perceptual systems by James J. Gibson. The American
Journal of Psychology, 80, 150–154.
Dewey, J. (1896). The reflex arc concept in psychology. Psychological Review, 3, 357–370.
Gibson, J. J. (1950). The perception of the visual world. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Gibson, J. J. (1966). The senses considered as perceptual systems. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Gibson, J. J. (1967). New reasons for realism. Synthese, 17, 162–172.
Gibson, J. J. (1986). The ecological approach to visual perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. (Original
work published 1979)