ecological perception
an organism’s detection of the affordances and invariances within its natural, real-world environment (i.e., its ecology as opposed to a laboratory setting), as mediated and guided by the organism’s immersion in and movement through that environment. James J. Gibson proposed that ecological perception is holistic (the organism and environment are a single inseparable system), that environmental properties are perceived as meaningful entities, and that perceptual patterns may be direct rather than concepts that require interpretation by higher brain centers from visual or other cues. See direct perception.