De-inventing the wheel: How information processing destroyed the science of vision

Abstract

A student opening a textbook on human vision is likely to be faced with a number of historical ‘approaches’ to the subject. Palmer (2002) has seven: Structuralism; Gestaltism; Ecological optics; Constructivism; Information processing; Computational; and Biological. The first four he dubs ‘Classical’ with the implication that the others should be dubbed ‘Modern’. Information processing, he claims, is a Kuhnian paradigm into which all earlier approaches may be assimilated. With it, he implies, psychology has intellectually ‘come of age’. This view exerts such a powerful grip on thinking that to even question it is seen as close to heresy. But question it we must because it has all but destroyed the science. Not only has it destroyed the many important insights that classical theorists had, it has destroyed the means by which they may be re-gained by declaring the methodologies that spawned them obsolete and invalid – not by evidence and rational argument, but by a sort of technological force majeure. With special reference to Ecological Optics this paper examines some classical insights destroyed by information processing, and by reference to real human experience and behaviour, shows how they may be built on with greater scientific rigour while retaining their sense.