Perception and problem solving

Abstract

Gibsonian psychology sometimes comes in for criticism along the following lines (e.g., Clark, 1998, 149 ff.).First, the critic grants that, yes, Gibson's ecological approach may provide a useful description of how perception works, at least for some limited set of animals and situations. But the critic then asserts that Gibson's approach simply cannot scale up to provide an account of how humans perform genuinely cognitively demanding tasks.Gibsonian psychology, we are told, is a non-starter when it comes to explaining, say, how we are able to remember the recipe for a lemon drizzle cake, or how we can plan what we will be doing at this time next Tuesday.Harry Heft has done more than most to defend Gibson's approach from such criticisms. Much of Heft's work has been focused on situating Gibson's perceptual program within the broader theoretical landscape of psychology.Heft's 2001 book, Ecological Psychology in Context, encompasses two projects. The first project is historical.In the first half of the book, Heft situates Gibson's ecological approach to perception within a particular historical tradition that begins with the phenomenologically rich psychology of William James and continues through the work of James's student, E. B. Holt. Heft's second project is more programmatic. In the second part of the book, Heft aims to expand ecological psychologists' understanding of what the environment is. Gibson's work was often narrowly focused on the psychology of perception, and this led him to emphasize animals' interactions with the inanimate furniture of the world around them: the substances, surfaces, and objects. Heft wants to draw ecological psychologists' attention to the fact that the perceiving animal exists not only in a physical environment, but also in a social environment, and moreover that learning to negotiate this social environment involves, at least in humans, a long history of development.For Heft, the question of whether Gibson's perceptual program can be scaled up to encompass higher cognition is ill-posed. It is ill-posed because Gibson's program was not intended to provide a new account of cognition, only a new account of perception. To demand that Gibson's program be scaled up to encompass higher cognition is to imply that Gibsonians can only ever think of higher cognition as an outgrowth of the kinds of perceptual processes that Gibson himself was interested in. Cognition, on this framing, would be a kind of perception-plus. This is a framing that Gibsonians should reject. It would be overly restrictive to assert that all problems in psychology are problems of perception.