Observations on active touch.
Gibson, J. J. (1962)
Psychological Review, 69, 477-91
- Nominator's statement
- cited in: Harre, R. (1981). Great scientific experiments: Twenty experiments that changed our view of the world.Oxford: Phaidon Press Ltd. "The study of perception, until transformed by the experiments of Gibson, was based upon a pervasive but unexamined assumption. It was supposed that perception was an essentially passive process.... Gibson formulated a new theory....In short, we learn...to explore our environments, actively seeking the invariants in the relations between changing sensation s. These invariants represent the permanent structures of the physical world. We do not, it seems, passively receive and automatically integrate sensory elements into the structured objects of perception.... Out of a host of ingenious experiments Gibson devised to demonstrate the advantages of the new theory, the most convincing and the most elegant was his demonstration of the role of exploration in the search for invariants in the perception of shape: The great cookie-cutter experiment....In this sim ple experiment Gibson demonstrated that active exploration, not passive reception, is the essential process in the way we perceive the things in the physical world." (From pp. 148-151.)
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