Journal of Psychology & Behavioral Science

Event Perception: Motor Theory vs. Direct Perception Theory
Young-Lim Lee

Abstract
People observe lots of events around the environment and we can easily recognize the nature of an event from the resulting optic flow. The questions are how do people recognize events and what is the information in the optic flow that enables observers to recognize events. There have been debates between motor theorists and direct perception theorists regarding of these problems. Motor theorists claim that human observers exhibit special sensitivity when perceiving speech or biological motion, because we both produce and perceive those events. However, direct perception theorists suggested that speech or biological motion is not special from the perception of all other kinds of event. In this article, I review this controversy to critique the motor theory and to describe a direct realist approach to event perception.

Full Text: PDF     DOI: 10.15640/jpbs.v2n3-4a2