James Jerome Gibson (/ˈɡɪbsən/; January 27, 1904 – December 11, 1979) was an American psychologist and is considered to be one of the most important contributors to the field of visual perception.
[1] A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked him as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S.
[4] Because his father worked on the railroad, Gibson and his family had to travel and relocate quite frequently, moving throughout the Dakotas and Wisconsin until they finally settled down in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette.
These experiences sparked Gibson's interest in optic flow and the visual information generated from different modes of transportation.
Later in life, Gibson would apply this fascination to the study of visual perception of landing and flying planes.
Holt's theory of molar behaviorism brought James's philosophy of radical empiricism into psychology.
While at Smith, Gibson encountered two influential figures in his life, one of which was the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka.
[6] The other important figure Gibson met during his time at Smith College was his wife, Eleanor Jack, who became a prominent psychologist known for her investigations such as the "visual cliff.
[4] Before the book was published in 1950, Gibson moved to Cornell University where he continued to teach and conduct research for the rest of his life.
[8] After publication of his book in 1950, Gibson won the Warren Medal as a member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 1952.
[10] His basic work rejected the perspective that perception in and of itself is meaningless, he instead argued meaning is independent of the perceiver.
[14] In his later work (such as, for example, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979)), Gibson became more philosophical and criticised cognitivism in the same way he had attacked behaviorism before.
[10] One of the most important statements in this book is that Gibson maintains that the optical information of an image is not an impression of form and color, but rather of invariants.
When coming across Earth's natural steep slopes, man designed stairs in order to afford walking.
James J. Gibson left a lasting impact on the way that psychologists and philosophers conceptualize perception and action.
He rejected the behaviorists' assumptions that learning involves the formation of associations between stimuli and responses, adopting instead a holistic view related to that of the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka with whom he had contact.
He argued that the perceived environment is not composed by stitching together such elements as shapes and edges, but rather that the world is made up of meaningful features that are experienced continuously as wholes.
[9] He will perhaps be best remembered for his theory of affordances, which some theorists have suggested provides a fundamental way to understand the duality of mind and external reality.
[9] For instance, a softball affords "throwing" if the observer notices that the ball fits well in a person's hand, and that the weight allows it to be thrown.
Gibson also argued that perceptual experimenters were misguided in their control over physical variables of stimuli, and the display of stimulus information should be manipulated instead.
This stance breaks from traditional thought in that Gibson posited that fundamentally sound experiments could be conducted in the external world without having to construct artificial laboratory settings.