Perceptual psychology

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Perceptual psychology is a subfield of cognitive psychology that is concerned specifically with the pre-conscious innate aspects of the human cognitive system: perception. A pioneer of this field was J. J. Gibson. A major study was that of cognitive biases mostly due to affordances, i.e. the perceived utility of objects in, or features of, one's surroundings. According to Gibson, such features or objects were perceived as affordances and not as separate or distinct objects in themselves.

This view, which some think an ideology, was central to several other fields notably:

• software user interface and usability engineering
• environmentalism in psychology, and ultimately in political economy where the perceptual view was used to explain the omission of key inputs or consequences of economic transactions, i.e. resources and wastes

Other writers on this topic have been Gerard Egan and Robert Bolton. These two explored areas of interpersonal interactions based on the premise that people act in accordance with their perception of a given situation. While behaviour is obvious, a persons thoughts and feelings are masked. This gives rise to the idea, that the most common problems between people are based on the assumption that we can guess what the other person is feeling and thinking. They also offered methods - within this scope, for effective communications. This includes: Reflective listening, Assertion Skills, Conflict Resolution etc.

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