Abstract
A mountain climber is ascending a high cliff. He searches for handholds, checks the adjustment of his rope, the position of the person above and below him, and looks for signs of ice that will make a foothold dangerous. He carefully avoids any patch of gravel. Meanwhile, the view around him may be breathtakingly beautiful, but we say that he is paying, for the moment at least, no “attention” to it. He has a task (self-set) at hand, and to perform it adaptively he must perceive the affordances for climbing in footholds, handholds, surface conditions, and the state of his companions. Otherwise, disaster awaits them. Optimal pickup of information of this sort requires experience and skill in detection of the affordances involved. The same degree and quality of selection of information would not be found in the same man performing a task like walking along a sidewalk. Walking along a sidewalk does not require careful inspection; such a task allows a search for information relevant to tasks other than locomotion. Indeed, sidewalks are built to make the job of walking easier, to put fewer demands on the system to search for information to locomote.
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© 1979 Plenum Press, New York
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Gibson, E., Rader, N. (1979). Attention. In: Hale, G.A., Lewis, M. (eds) Attention and Cognitive Development. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-2985-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-2985-5_1
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