![]() ![]() The contemporary psychologist Irvin Rock ( 1983) advances a view that explicitly treats much of perception as a process of hypothesis generation and testing. The nineteenth-century German physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz argued that the processes underlying visual perception are of the same general sort as inductive generalization employed in scientific reasoning (see Inductive inference Inference to the best explanation). Indirect theorists, of course, do not deny that perceptual processes are implemented in neural structures, but they argue that such processes should be characterized at a distinct, psychological, level of description.ĭirect theories of perception are sometimes explicitly contrasted with accounts that treat perception as a species of inference, akin to the drawing of a conclusion from premises according to a principle or rule. ![]() A direct theory explicates any intervening or supplementary processing that occurs in perception in terms of neural structures and processes directly implemented in the brain. In other words, they deny that visual processes have any true psychological description. Direct theorists deny that visual processes can be characterized in terms of ideas, beliefs, representations, knowledge or memories. ![]() In other words, it concerns the character of the intervening processes. The issue that separates the two camps concerns neither the amount of information contained in the stimulus, nor even the precise character of this information, but, rather, how the information in the stimulus is accessed and used by the visual system to produce knowledge that is useful to the organism. But to characterize the fundamental difference between direct and indirect theories as a disagreement over the richness of the stimulus is to misplace the dispute. Gibson (1904–79), a prominent direct theorist, claimed that the input to the visual system is not a series of static ‘time slices’ of the retinal image, but rather, the smooth transformations of the optic array as the subject moves about its environment (what Gibson ( 1979) called ‘retinal flow’). The difference between direct and indirect accounts of perception has been characterized as a disagreement over the richness of the stimulus, with direct theorists typically arguing that the stimulus contains more information than indirect theorists have been willing to allow. Since Berkeley’s theory and the models of the geometric writers both posit psychological processing of the image (albeit of different sorts), they are considered indirect theories of vision. Mathematical calculation of distance and size based on the prior representation of lines and angles, whether accessible to consciousness or not, is a psychological process (see Intentionality). Any process that occurs in consciousness, such as the association of ideas, is a psychological process, as is any process that involves learning. While the notion of a psychological process admits of no precise definition, examples come readily to mind. Ideas or perceptions are thought not to be ‘direct’ if they are produced by psychological processes. The claim that visual perception is not direct or immediate involves more than the truism that some processing of the retinal image is necessary to account for what we see.
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