A related area of study is sensory (or perceptual) ecology. This field aims at understanding the unique sensory and interpretive systems all organisms develop, based on the specific ecological environments they live in, experience and adapt to. A key researcher in this field has been psychologist James J. Gibson, who has written numerous seminal volumes considering the senses in terms of holistic, self-contained perceptual systems. These exhibit their own mindful, interpretive behaviour, rather than acting simply as conduits delivering information for cognitive processing, as in more representational philosophies of perception or theories of psychology (1966, 1979). Perceptual systems detect affordances in objects in the world, directing attention towards information about an object in terms of the possible uses it affords an organism.