The Ecological Approach to Perception

The ecological approach to visual perception stems from work by James and Eleanor Gibson starting in the 1950s. In both of these works, Gibson is ultimately trying to kind of make a science out of William James' understanding of perception. So what Gibson says is that it's ecological in that you start your explanation of perception in the environment with the information available for perception. And only once you really understood theinformation available for perception would it make much sense to speculate on function of neural elements or things like that.