A Systems Approach to Perception and Action

ABSTRACT

On the 50th anniversary of its publication, we look back on some of the intellectual contributions of Gibson's (1966) The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. This work is often seen as contributing a new perspective to our understanding of the 5 senses. In this paper, we explore another intellectual contribution: Gibson's treatment of perception–action as an irreducible, functional system. We review select examples of systems thinking from the physical, animal, and human social domains. Our suggestion is that a systems-level approach to social interactions would have been a natural extension of Gibson's ideas.

Acknowledgments

We thank Pablo Covarrubias for inviting us to contribute to this special edition of Ecological Psychology and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions regarding the content of this paper.

Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant BCS 1255922 (to Polemnia G. Amazeen). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.