Gibsonian categorization of vision

Categories of visual perception, or of research into visual perception, proposed by James J. Gibson in The ecological approach to visual perception:

“

Vision is studies by first requiring the subject to fixate a point and then exposing momentarily a stimulus or a pattern of stimuli around the fixation point. I call this Snapshot vision. If the exposure period is made longer, the eye will scan the pattern to which it is exposed, fixating the parts in succession unless the subject is prohibited from doing so. I call this Aperture vision, for it is a little like looking at the environment through a knothole in a fence…. The headrest of the laboratory prevents the observer from turning his head and looking around, which provides what I will call Ambient vision. It also, of course, prevents him from getting up and walking around, which provides Ambulatory vision. Are these forms of vision? I suggest they are; in fact, they are the kind of vision we need in life, not just pictorial depth perception….

Looking around and getting around do not fit into the standard idea of what visual perception is. But not that if an animal has eyes at all it swivels its head around and it goes from place to place. The single, frozen field of view provides only impoverished information about the world. The visual system did not evolve for this. The evidence suggests that visual awareness is in fact panoramic and does in fact persist during long acts of locomotion. —p1

This perspective fits well with the characteristics of perceptual experience discussed by Alva Noë, Andy Clark, and others in Perceptual Experience and Sensorimotor Dependencies.