James J. Gibson
American perceptual psychologist at Cornell University
American psychologist who argued that perceivers pick up information from the structure of light, developed the ecological approach to perception, and put forward the concept of affordances. During the Second World War he led work on pilot-screening tests.
Why this person matters
Gibson rejected the view that perception is built from sensations. He proposed that the environment offers information, and that animals perceive what it affords for action. His wartime work on pilot screening and on the visual task of flying and landing came before this theory. Eleanor Gibson collaborated with him on perceptual learning.
Main contributions
Optical information and the 1950 book
In The Perception of the Visual World (1950) he proposed a psychophysics of surfaces, objects and movement. The memoir gives the gradient of texture density along the ground, which specifies the slant of a surface, as an example of a higher-order variable of stimulation, and says he saw sensations as products of artificial laboratory situations.
The ecological approach and affordances
The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966) shifted attention to a moving perceiver and to invariants in changing stimulation. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979) described information available through interaction with the environment, including affordances, defined in terms of an animal's needs and possible actions.
Wartime aviation research
He was a captain in the Army Air Forces in 1942 and directed the Motion Picture Research Unit of its Aviation Psychology Program, which developed visual aptitude tests for pilot applicants. The memoir also mentions his research on aircraft identification and on the visual task of flying and landing.
Context and limits
The National Academy memoir calls the 1950 book "still widely cited and controversial" and notes that the later work prompted many articles in the name of ecological psychology "and many in opposition as well". Gibson and Eleanor Gibson argued in 1955 that perceptual learning is differentiation rather than associative enrichment. Her later visual cliff experiments with R. D. Walk tested infants' depth perception. Donald Norman adapted affordance for design, substantially changing its meaning.
In your introductory course
Sensation and perception.Gibson appears in the perception chapter as the main alternative to constructivist accounts, with affordances and the ecological approach. The term affordance is also used in design and human-computer interaction.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 5.1. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1928
He began teaching psychology at Smith College after his Princeton degrees.
- 1942
He was a captain in the Army Air Forces and took up its aviation psychology work.
- 1950
He published The Perception of the Visual World.
- 1966
He published The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems.
- 1979
He published The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, the year he died.
Sources
- National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs vol. 63, James Jerome GibsonSociety or association. Text passages inspected.
- Wikipedia, James J. GibsonReference work. Reference article inspected.