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