The Perception & Action Podcast 569 – Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Chaps 6-7 (JC 62)
Apr 14, 2026
They unpack Gibsonian ecological information and how it differs from Shannon-style information. They explore events, directionality, and how optic arrays change with observer movement. They discuss perceiving self-motion and body parts visually, multisensory event structure, and how perception specifies affordances and action possibilities.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Design Tasks At The Ecological Scale
- Attend to ecological scale when designing perceptual tasks: measure events like color change or surface rotting, not atomic chemistry.
- Marianne and Andrew emphasize perceivers need higher-order event info (e.g., ripe apple affordance).
We Perceive Events Not Time
- Gibson argues we perceive events rather than time itself; time is an abstraction derived from event structure.
- Rob criticizes classical time-perception experiments as impoverished event contexts that mislead conclusions.
Finding Ecological Information Variables Is Technically Hard
- Identifying ecological information mathematically is hard because events often involve complex surface deformations.
- Rob lists known examples (tau, optic flow, outfield problem) but notes we only have a dozen or so concrete variables.
