ACTION AND PERCEPTION:

Perception and action are both co-dependent on each other, and one couldn’t exist without the
other. An example of this at the physical level is how we receive information from our muscles to
help control perception. Our eyes have to move and perform saccades in order for us to get a clear
image of our environment. Even rudimentary actions such as balance become a lot harder when we
have our eyes closed.

- SPECIALISATION:

Our visual systems are specialised to the actions that we perform. A frog in a room full of dead flies
will starve as it can only perceive moving walls, stationary walls, light / dark and moving dots. The
energy needed to perceive the dead fly would be so great that the frog would die. We only perceive
what we need to for survival, a result of evolution. The bug detectors in the frog are connected
directly to its tongue.

- PUROPSES OF PERCEPTION:

The purpose of perception is fully linked to action, as perception allows us to see what we can and
cannot do. One of the main reasons is to see the future and what is approaching. As stated earlier,
the most basic level this started at was photoreceptor cells that told a clam to open and shut if there
was a shadow over the top or not. Jellyfish have these cells on their jelly so they don’t come out
while it is sunny and get burnt. It all depends on the breakdown of opsins.

J.J. Gibson took an ecological approach to perception and talked about vision being more than just a
snapshot. Perception happens over time, allowing us to specify the world we need to know.

- STAGES OF ACTION AND PERCEPTION:

There are three main stages regarding how we perceive the world and then use that information to
act accordingly:

STEP 1 - GATHERING THE INFORMATION: visual angles are projected onto the back of the retina,
meaning that the inverse projection problem doesn’t become a problem, as we can see different
angles and shadows giving us the entirety of the image that we need. The stimulus is not
impoverished if we move.

The stimulus for projection is actually optic flow, which refers to the rate of change of objects in our
visual field as we walk past them or away from them. This allows us to learn more about our
environment over time. Objects that are closer move more than objects that are far away. This is
used in conjunction with the point of expansion, which is an area that doesn’t move. Usually this is
at our eyesight, as this is a stable and fixed point when moving horizontally.

We use cues such as the CONSTANT RATE OF CHANGE (a depth cue that shows us that objects get
bigger and smaller in relation to each other) and MOTION PARALLAX (where the background moves
slower when we move quickly than the foreground).

STEP 2 - PERCEPTUAL MOTOR COUPLINGS: we learn to couple relevant visual information with a
given motor output. Babies practice this a lot as they develop. This is seen in the fact that they crawl
about 39 football fields a day and make more than 200 spontaneous hand movements a day as they
are testing and establishing couplings i.e. if I move my hand like this I can grip something.
This allows us to learn the consequences of our actions. Hein and Hein (1963) had one cat drag
another cat around a visual experience of coloured bars from birth. Both cats had the exact same
visual experience but one had a motor experience. When then presented with the visual cliff (Gibson
and Walk), the cat that walked was scared and the basket cat didn’t care at all. Vision needs motor
sense to develop efficiently.

Babies actually do not understand that a 3D object has not changed when it has been rotated. Once
a baby can sit up, she can use her hands to rotate the object back and forth, and the tactile, motor,
and visual information is sufficient for them to learn that the object has not changed. We learn that
walking to a target is possible if we make a 90 degree angle to it.

OPTIC FLOW CALIBRATION: our optic flow can calibrate our own speed and the things that are
moving around us. We also act on these visual angles without even realizing it. This is seen when we
try to catch a baseball. Instead of tracking it with the eyes straight, we run in a curve to get to it. We
can also use TIME TO CONTACT (TTC) which is calculated by dividing the visual angle by the rate of
the visual angle. This tells us when the object is to hit.

STEP 3 - SELF OPTIMISATION: we evolved to run over long distances so we do not have fur. This
allowed us to simply chase our prey until it tired itself out and died. Nepalese porters walk for 15
seconds, then rest for 45 and so on. This is the supposed most efficient way to travel. Our hot brains
are optimized to cool down. If a monkey had our brain it would overheat to death. The gait
transition (Minetti et al.) is an evolutionary response where it is easier to conserve energy to start
running than to keep walking. This is modulated by optic flow.

Optimization is also seen in terms of path and gradient perception. The flattest path isn’t always the
most metabolically optimal one. Minetti et al. (1995) found that for hills below 15 degrees, the
optimal path is the straight one. For hills above 15 degrees, travelers should zigzag so that the
gradient of ascension is 15 degrees (which will vary with respect to the steepness of the hill).