Tools for Perceptual Learning: Ecological Augmented Reality
Vicente Raja · 2016
Ecological Augmented Reality (E-AR) devices —designed under neo-Gibsonian principles of ecological psychology— can play a central role in perceptual learning. Perceptual learning, under the ecological lens, is direct insofar as no intermediate processing stages are needed. Direct learning boils down to the way an organism swaps one ambient energy variable for another in information space. The change that takes place as the organism learns allows it to deal better with environmental contingencies. E-AR devices permit us reshape information space in meaningful ways. If, according to the theory of direct learning, vector fields in information space code for the type of information that guides learning, E-AR devices can help us enrich the ambient energy variables that the organism, in an augmented reality environment, tunes to. Direct learning relies upon the calibration and education of attention and of intention towards different and more-functional environmental information. In this way, perceptual learning does not require the preservation of a mental copy of environmental information, but only the improvement in the detection of accurate environmental information for successful interaction. Were we to be able to detect appropriate clues, we would accomplish our goals adequately. The novelty of our approach resides in the fact that we propose to create and exploit particular ecological information by juxtaposing a virtual layer of information with the ‘real world’ layer. E-AR provides two potential innovations: first, by paying attention to the juxtaposition of virtual and real layers, E-AR differs from mainstream augmented reality, which, based exclusively on the overlap of symbols and the ‘real world’, neglects the embodied-embedded character of cognition. Second, it represents a further step for both direct learning’s research and the learning devices of end users.