James J. Gibson

James Jerome Gibson (1904 to 1979) was an American psychologist regarded as one of the most important contributors to the study of visual perception. Born in McConnelsville, Ohio, he studied at Princeton, where Herbert Langfeld served as his doctoral adviser and he took his doctorate in 1928, taught at Smith College, directed a unit of the Army Air Forces aviation psychology program in World War II, and spent the rest of his career at Cornell University. He challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs conscious visual perception and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind directly perceives the environment. He coined the noun affordance for the opportunities for action that an environment offers an animal, and set out his views in The Perception of the Visual World (1950), The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966) and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979). With his wife Eleanor Gibson he proposed perceptual learning as a process of seeing differences in the perceptual field. He died in Ithaca, New York, in 1979.