James j gibson biography meaning

James Jerome Gibson (January 27, 1904 – December 11, 1979), was an Americanpsychologist, considered one of the most important twentieth century psychologists in the field of visual perception. In his classic work, The Perception of the Visual World (1950), he rejected the fashionable behaviorism and the classical approach of Hermann von Helmholtz and others to perception for a view based on his experimental work. His theories pioneered the idea that observers sample information from the outside visual world using an active perceptual system rather than passively receiving input through their senses and then processing this input to obtain a construction of the world. For Gibson, the world contained "invariant" information that was directly accessible to the perceptual systems of humans and animals which are attuned to pick up this information through "direct perception."

Gibson used an "ecological approach" to perception, based on the interaction between the observer and the environment. He also coined the term "affordance," meaning the interactive possibilities of a particular object or environment. This concept has been extremely influential in the field of design and ergonomics, as well as work in the context of human-machine interaction.

Gibson focused on the "perceptual system," almost ignoring the role of the higher order cognitive processes. This caused much confusion, misunderstanding, and rejection of his theories. Gibson's desire was to make a contribution to knowledge, and his work succeeded in that regard. It challenged traditional approaches in psychology, stimulating debate, research, and new understanding. He did not solve everything; but he did not expect to.

Life

James Jerome Gibson was born in McConnelsville, Ohio on January 27, 1904. His father was a railroad man and his mother a teacher. He grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan. At an early age he was interested in how things appeared i

(b. McConnelsville, Ohio, 27 January 1904; d. Ithaca, New York, 11 December 1979),

psychology, perception, vision, ecological psychology, perception-action, epistemology

Gibson was an innovative twentieth-century experimental psychologist whose work focused primarily on visual perception of the everyday world. His research and theoretical contributions over five decades culminated in a highly original perspective, the ecological approach to perceiving. This approach is unique in providing theoretical grounds and empirical support for the epistemological position of direct realism, which is the view that individuals perceive the environment directly. As such, it offers an alternative to the long-dominant claim that perception of the environment is mediated by subjective, mental processes (indirect realism).

Gibson’s first book, The Perception of the Visual World(1950), was highly acclaimed and influential because of the compelling case it made for the presence of higher-order structures in patterns of visual stimulation. Recognition of these structural patterns offered some novel solutions to several long-standing perceptual problems. This book anticipated the later ecological approach in several ways, but because of its psychophysical framework, it remained tied to standard formulations of perceiving. With the publication of his later two books, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966) and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), Gibson fully broke from traditional approaches and offered his radical and original reformulation of perception from an ecological perspective.

Among the notable concepts that Gibson developed in formulating the ecological approach were perceptual systems and affordances. The concept of perceptual systems portrays perceiving as a process of exploration and detection of structure from a rich array of stimulus information. Such a view is a departure from standard accounts, which

Abstract

Ecological Psychology is an embodied, situated, and non-representational approach pioneered by J. J. Gibson and E. J. Gibson. This theory aims to offer a third way beyond cognitivism and behaviorism for understanding cognition. The theory started with the rejection of the premise of the poverty of the stimulus, the physicalist conception of the stimulus, and the passive character of the perceiver of mainstream theories of perception. On the contrary, the main principles of ecological psychology are the continuity of perception and action, the organism-environment system as unit of analysis, the study of affordances as the objects of perception, combined with an emphasis on perceptual learning and development. In this paper, first, we analyze the philosophical and psychological influences of ecological psychology: pragmatism, behaviorism, phenomenology, and Gestalt psychology. Second, we summarize the main concepts of the approach and their historical development following the academic biographies of the proponents. Finally, we highlight the most significant developments of this psychological tradition. We conclude that ecological psychology is one of the most innovative approaches in the psychological field, as it is reflected in its current influence in the contemporary embodied and situated cognitive sciences, where the notion of affordance and the work of E. J. Gibson and J. J. Gibson is considered as a historical antecedent.

Keywords: ecological psychology, Gibson, perception-action, affordances, specificity, perceptual learning, pragmatism

Introduction

This article has been written to be part of the research topic “History of Psychology as a Scientific Discipline,” an article collection for Frontiers in Psychology. Here we offer a succinct introduction to the history and philosophy of ecological psychology for the general reader, aiming to complement former introductions and works offered by researchers within this approach.

Ecological psyc

American psychologist (1904–1979)

James Jerome Gibson (; 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. 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.

Biography

Early life

James Jerome Gibson was born in McConnelsville, Ohio, on January 27, 1904, to Thomas and Gertrude Gibson. He was the oldest of three children and had two younger brothers, Thomas and William. Gibson's father worked for Wisconsin Central Railroad, and his mother was a schoolteacher. 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.

When Gibson was a boy, his father would take him out on train rides. Gibson recalled being absolutely fascinated by the way the visual world would appear when in motion. In the direction of the train, the visual world would appear to flow in the same direction and expand. When Gibson looked behind the train, the visual world would seem to contract. 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.

Education and career