Information and Its Detection
Brandon J. Thomas, Michael A. Riley, Jeffrey B. Wagman · 2019
The theory of information pickup collapses the epistemic gap that traditionally necessitates the invocation of cognitive processing. By developing a new ontology, the ecological approach changes the course of psychological inquiry. For E. J. Gibson, the momentary stimulation of the sense receptors is merely incidental to detection of information and, thus, to perception. As pointed out by Gibson and later by Claire Michaels and C. Carello, although separation of the past, present, and future in subjective experience has intuitive appeal, this separation has no empirical or theoretical basis. W. H. Warren’s behavioral dynamics model of perception-action nicely captures the notion of a perceptual system in the parlance of dynamical systems. Understanding how the perceptual systems are coordinated so as to actively exploit invariants from the ambient flux of energy is analogous to the degrees of freedom problem in motor control. Most contemporary theories of psychology create an epistemic gap that separates reality from experience.