Four Ways to Reject Directed Perception

Burton and Turvey (1990) found that two invariants, the first and second moments of mass distribution, were available and used for the perception of the length of a hand-held rod. The first predominated in holding and the second in wielding. They denied, however, that these invariants were information. Thus, they deny directed perception (Cutting, 1986), which allows for multiple specifi- cation of objects/events, in favor of direct perception, which preserves a one- to-one mapping between objects/events and perceived qualities. In this commen- tary, after some introductory questions and answers, I cite some evidence I take in support of multiply specified information for perception. I then outline four schemes for countermanding this evidence. These are (a) the appeal to proximal information identity, (b) the appeal to underlying information identity, (c) the appeal to broken linkage between information and experimental variables, and (d) the appeal to cross-modal holism of information. I claim Burton and Turvey (1990) espouse both (a) and (c).