Learning to Perceive or Perceiving to Learn?

Eleanor Jack Gibson built her theory of perceptual learning over a 70-year research career. She published her first paper on perceptual learning in 1932 (J. J. Gibson, Jack, & Raffel, 1932) and her last book in 2002 (E. J. Gibson, 2002). There is a clear thread from beginning to end, but she was not dogmatic in her ideas; her theories were always informed by data, and data collection was often inspired by real life and serendipity. Her theory is consistent with but not identical to James Gibson’s (1979) ecological approach to perception. Although the Gibsons were married and shared many arguments and ideas about perceptual learning and development, they wrote only five articles together (E. J. Gibson, 2002). Thus, in this entry, “Gibson” refers to Eleanor Gibson unless otherwise noted. Gibson’s 1969 book, Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development, described her theory in detail and jump-started a new field of inquiry. However, as new methods and findings became available, notably new ways of studying perception in young infants, Gibson questioned things that she had once taken for granted and broadened her domain of inquiry. In later writings, Gibson critiqued her 1969 account for failing to capture how infants learn to detect the perceptual information for guiding action adaptively as their perceptual-motor systems are developing. In fact, she considered infancy to be the perfect place to study perceptual learning (E. J. Gibson, 1992) and she was instrumental in building the field of infant perception (Pick, 1992). On Gibson’s (1969) account, perceptual learning entails an increased ability to extract relevant information from a stimulus array as the result of experience. The traditional view of perceptual learning, dating back to Bishop Berkeley in the 1700s, is that animals must learn to perceive; the information at sensory receptors is impoverished and meaningless and thus a complete percept requires learning. In Gibson’s view, the information at receptors is sufficient to support complete percepts from the start, and thus animals needn’t learn to perceive; rather, they perceive to learn (E. J. Gibson, 1989, July). Perceptual learning is the key to knowledge and where it all begins. Gibson (1992) maintained that a theory of perceptual learning must answer basic questions: What is learned and what is the function? What instigates learning and what terminates the process? As for the question of mechanism, Gibson held that meaningful explanations of psychological processes must be at the level of behavior. She always maintained that the job of a perception psychologist is to describe and explain perception at the level of individual behavior, not in terms of the underlying neurophysiology (E. J. Gibson & Pick, 2000). Perceptual processes should be consistent with what we know about neural mechanisms and physiology, but these facts should not drive research Gibson’s Theory of Perceptual Learning