Who is the greatest/foremost/most significant contributor to perceptional psychology? Whether s/he be the person who developed/uncovered perceptional psychology and pioneered it or s/he who is responsible for the most significant breakthrough. As well, what is his/her most noted publication? Where can I find it as well as writing on that publication. Specifically, perception reserved to the modality of seeing/sight. thanks.

-- stephen carroll (papaicarroll@hotmail.com), October 24, 2004

Answers

I think you'll have to make the decision yourself, after reading the history. Most histories of psychology devote considerable detail to this question, as it is an aspect of the problem of knowledge, the question of "how do we know?" I especially like the way Dan Robinson links the age-old philosophical questions to later psychology of perception/cognition etc. in his An Intellectual History of Psychology. Aristotle's work on the five senses is important, but there are many candidates. Consider Berkeley's Notes Toward a New Theory of Vision, the many contributions of Descartes, etc. Then there are the later contributors to theories of color vision (Hering, Goethe, Ladd-Franklin and others), the work of Dalton on color blindness, others who worked on distance/space perception. Still other fascinating work was done by George Stratton (on adaptation to an inverted image on the retina). You might check some of the wonderful work on the history of perception by Nicholas Wade, whose portrait of pioneers in the psychology of perception are intriguing works of art.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@cox.net), October 25, 2004.

Hello Stephen.

While considering candidates for the "foremost contributor to perceptional psychology" you might like to check out the following books and articles:

Gibson, J.J. (1966). The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Gibson, J.J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Wilcox, S. & Katz, S. Can Indirect Realism be Demonstrated in the Psychological Laboratory? Phil. Soc. Sci., 14, 149-157.

Lombardo, T.J. (1987). The Reciprocity of Perceiver and Environment. Hillsdale, NJ: LEA.

Reed. E. & Jones, R. (Eds.). (1982). Reasons for Realism. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc.

Reed, E. (1987). James Gibson's Ecological Approach to Cognition. In A. Costall & A. Still (Eds.). Cognitive Psychology in Question. Sussex: Harvester Press.

Reed, E. (1988). Why Do Things Look as they do? In G. Claxton (Ed.). Growth Points in Cognition (pp. 90-113). New York: Routledge.

Reed, E. (1988). James J. Gibson and the Psychology of Perception. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Cheers,

Paul F. Ballantyne

-- Paul F. Ballantyne (pballan@comnet.ca), October 25, 2004.