 Brunswik’s lens model is formulated around his ideas about how behavioral and environmental conditions bear on organisms perceiving proximal cues to draw inferences about some distal feature of its “natural-cultural habitat” (Brunswik 1955: 198). To illustrate, an organism may detect the color markings (distal object) of a potential mate through contrasts in light frequencies reflecting across its retina (proximal cues). Some proximal cues will be more informative about the distal objects of interest than others, which Brunswik understood as a difference in the “objective” correlations between proximal cues and the target distal objective. The ecological validity of proximal cues thus refers to their capacity for providing the organism useful information about some distal object within a particular environment. Assessments of performance for an organism then amount to a comparison of the organism’s actual use of cue information to the cue’s information capacity.