Visual Perception Theorists

To begin my research I really need to get my head around what visual perception is and who the key theorists are as they will feature heavily throughout my dissertation. As this was a similar topic to my level 5 essay I will be using some of the resources from then to gather all of my research, this helps me in terms of time and ease.
What is visual perception?

“Perception is an active process of locating and extracting information from the environment and learning is the process of acquiring information through experience and storing information. Thinking is the manipulation of information to solve problems. The easier it is to extract information (perceive) the easier our thinking process becomes.” (Forgus)

Key Theorists
1. Gestaltists
2. Gibson
3. Gregory
4. Marr

1. Gestalt:
Gestaltists believe that thewhole of an experience is indeed comprised of a series of parts which can bediscovered through analysis but they deny that the whole can be understood byanalysis of these individual parts. The whole learning experience is differentthan the sum of its parts.

Who:
Gestalt therapy was developed by Fritz Perls, Laura Perls and Paul Goodman in the 1940s and 1950s.
The concept of gestalt was first introduced in philosophy and psychology in 1890 by Christian von Ehrenfels (a member of the School of Brentano). The idea of gestalt has its roots in theories by David Hume, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Immanuel Kant, David Hartley, and Ernst Mach.
Early 20th century theorists, such as Kurt Koffka, Max Wertheimer, and Wolfgang Köhler (students of Carl Stumpf) saw objects as perceived within an environment according to all of their elements taken together as a global construct. This 'gestalt' or 'whole form' approach sought to define principles of perception—seemingly innate mental laws that determined the way objects were perceived.

2. Gibson

Perception is direct There is enough information in our environment to make sense of the world in a direct way. Perception is a bottom-up process, which means that sensory information is analyzed in one direction: from simple analysis of raw sensory data to ever increasing complexity of analysis through the visual system. Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs conscious visual perception, and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or processing.

Who:James Gibson (1966) was an American psychologist who received his Ph.D. from Princeton University's Department of Psychology, ason challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs conscious visual perception, and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or processing.

3. Gregory

Psychologist Richard Gregory argued that perception is a constructive process which relies on top-down processing. For Gregory (1970) perception is a hypothesis. For Gregory, perception involves making inferences about what we see and trying to make a best guess. Prior knowledge and past experience, he argued, are crucial in perception. When we look at something, we develop a perceptual hypothesis, which is based on prior knowledge. The hypotheses we develop are nearly always correct. However, on rare occasions, perceptual hypotheses can be disconfirmed by the data we perceive.

Who:

Richard Langton Gregory CBE FRS FRSE (24 July 1923 – 17 May 2010) was a British psychologist and Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Bristol. Gregory's main contribution to the discipline was in the development of cognitive psychology, in particular that of "Perception as hypotheses", an approach which had its origin in the work of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) and his student Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920). Between them, the two Germans laid the basis of investigating how the senses work, especially sight and hearing.

Marr:

Marr proposed three different levels for the understanding of information processing systems (having vision systems as the target example): computational theory; representation and algorithm; and hardware implementation. One of the Marr's most important contribution was made in the level of representation and algorithm when he proposed a representational framework for vision (Figure 1). He concentrated on the vision task of deriving shape information from images.

Who:

David Courtnay Marr (19 January 1945 – 17 November 1980) was a British neuroscientist and psychologist. Marr integrated results from psychology, artificial intelligence, and neurophysiology into new models of visual processing. His work was very influential in Computational neuroscience and led to a resurgence of interest in the discipline.

After looking in depth into each of the theories, at this point I feel that Gestalt, Gibson and Gregory and the three key theories I will be looking further into regarding my essay as I feel that these are the most relevant to Graphic Design in the terms of which I am considering visual perception.