Perception and problem solving

We discuss a suggestion, made by Harry Heft, that Gibson's ecological approach to perception is compatible with the theory of distributed cognition. We focus on the domain of problem solving. We provide examples of problems in which perception plays a constitutive role in the finding of a solution. We conclude that grounding distributed cognition theory in Gibson's account of direct perception offers a promising avenue for future work seeking to understand human behavior across social and higher cognitive domains.