James J. Gibson

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. Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs conscious visual perception, and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or processing.^[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. Woodworth.^[2]

Biography

Early life

James Jerome Gibson was born in

Gibson began his undergraduate career at Northwestern University, but transferred after his freshman year to Princeton University, where he majored in philosophy. While enrolled at Princeton, Gibson had many influential professors including Edwin B. Holt who advocated new realism, and Herbert S. Langfeld who had taught Gibson's experimental psychology course. After taking Langfeld's course, Gibson decided to stay at Princeton as a graduate student and pursued his Ph.D. in psychology with Langfeld serving as his doctoral adviser.^[5] His doctoral dissertation focused on memory of visual forms, and he received his Ph.D. in 1928.^[4]

Gibson started his career at Smith College as a psychology teacher. While at Smith, Gibson encountered two influential figures in his life, one of which was the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka. Although Gibson did not agree with Gestalt psychology, he nevertheless agreed with Koffka's belief that the primary investigations of psychology should be problems related to perception.^[7] 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][8] The two were married on September 17, 1932, and later had two children, James Jerome Jr. in 1940 and Jean Grier in 1943.^[4]

In 1941, Gibson entered the U.S. Army, where he became the director of a unit for the

Gibson died in Ithaca, New York on December 11, 1979. He was 75 years old.^[7]

Major contributions and works

Gibson's approach to visual perception

The question driving Gibson's research on perception was "how do we see the world as we do?". This instigated his empirical research, the environment, and how the individual experiences said environment.^[10] There were two primary ways in which James J. Gibson reformed the way psychology views perception. The first is that the templates of our stimulation are affected by a moving organism. This was shown through his research on optic arrays. Secondly, he formulated the idea of three-dimensional space being conceptual. To Gibson, perception is a compilation of the person's environment and how the person interacts with it.^[11]

James Gibson's major contributions throughout his career were published in three of his major works: The Perception of the Visual World (1950), The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966), and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979).^[12]

Much of Gibson's work on perception derives from his time spent in the U.S. Army Air Force. Here, he delved into thoughts on how imperative perception is on daily functions.^[10] His work may be the first to show a distinct difference between types of perception. Form perception, on one hand, is a display of two static displays, whereas object perception, involves one of the displays to be in motion.^[10] Gibson laid down the base for empirical perception research throughout his lifetime. He did work on adaptation and inspection of curved lines, which became a precursor for perceptual research later.^[11] His basic work rejected the perspective that perception in and of itself is meaningless, he instead argued meaning is independent of the perceiver. He claimed that the environment decides perception, and that meaning is in what the environment "affords" the observer.^[13]

Major works

In his classic work The Perception of the Visual World (1950) he rejected the then fashionable theory of

Gibson coined the noun affordance.^[18] For Gibson the noun affordance pertains to the environment providing the opportunity for action. Affordances require a relationship in which the environment and the animal can work together. An example is that mankind has changed the environment to better suit our needs. When coming across Earth's natural steep slopes, man designed stairs in order to afford walking. In addition, objects in the environment can also afford many different behaviors, such as lifting or grasping. Gibson argued that when we perceive an object we observe the object's affordances and not its particular qualities. He believed that perceiving affordances of an object is easier than perceiving the many different qualities an object may have. Affordances can be related to different areas of the habitat as well. Some areas of the world allow for concealing while some allow for foraging.

Legacy

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.^[10] 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.

Previous theories of sensory meaning have argued that perceptions are separate and private from one another.^[17] This stance placed all of the perceptive meaning on the individual, which meant there was no way to find common ground on individuals' shared experiences. Gibson contended that when stimulus information is being sought out, meaningful properties of that stimulus are also perceived relationally.^[10] 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.^[10] The training of aviators is a practical application of Gibson's views, which such suggest that training should be as realistic and unconstrained as possible.

Gibson's work indicates the interactivity of observers and the natural environment, and has been dubbed ecological psychology as a result. 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.^{[citation needed]}

Publications

• Gibson, James Jerome., Crooks, Laurence E. "A theoretical field-analysis of automobile-driving." The American journal of psychology 51.3 (1938): 458 A Theoretical Field-Analysis of Automobile-Driving
• Gibson, J.J. & Gibson, E. (1955). "Perceptual learning: differentiation or enrichment?" Psyc. Rev., 62, 32–41.
• Gibson, J.J. (1950). The Perception of the Visual World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• Gibson, J.J. (1960). "The Concept of the Stimulus in Psychology." The American Psychologist 15/1960, 694–703.
• Gibson, J.J. (1966). The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
  ISBN 0-313-23961-4
• Gibson, J.J. (1972). "A Theory of Direct Visual Perception." In J. Royce, W. Rozenboom (eds.). The Psychology of Knowing. New York: Gordon & Breach.
• Gibson, J.J. (1977). The Theory of Affordances (pp. 67–82). In R. Shaw & J. Bransford (eds.). Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Gibson, J.J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
  ISBN 0-89859-959-8
  (1986)
• Gibson, J.J. (1982). Reasons for Realism: Selected essays of James J. Gibson, E. Reed & R. Jones (eds.). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  ISBN 978-0-89859-207-8