The program of those who 
share this theoretical 
perspective, then, is to 
discover what the higher-order 
features of the stimulus are for 
every kind of perception. By 
essentially considering a 
perception as a response and 
the features of the input as a 
stimulus, they attempt to 
sidestep assumptions about the 
mind in much the same way as 
the Behaviorists do.

THE INFORMATION PROCESSING 
PERSPECTIVE In the last several 
decades a new approach has 
arisen. Instead of thinking of 
the stimulus on the retina in 
terms of energy, it is thought of 
as information that is then 
processed by the brain. A 
number of separate 
developments converged to 
form the basis of this approach, 
such as the invention of 
computers and Cybernetics, 
which made use of concepts 
such as bits and channels of 
information. One of the 
founding fathers of this 
approach was the British 
psychologist Donald Broadbent. 
Following the experiments of 
the British investigator E. Colin 
Cherry, in which different 
messages were transmitted to 
the ears simultaneously, 
Broadbent outlined a theory in 
which attention was thought of 
as the selection of one channel 
or another by means of filters 
that allowed only the stimuli 
from one channel to be 
transmitted deeper into the 
brain. Other investigators such 
as Ulric Neisser, then at 
Brandeis University, sought to 
analyze the stages of 
information processing that led 
to the development of internal 
representations.