The Work of James Jerome Gibson

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I. Brief biography1
James Jerome Gibson was born on January 27, 1904, in McConnelsville, Ohio, U.S. and died on December 11, 1979. He was an experimental psychologist whose work focused primarily on visual perception. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Princeton University in 1928 and joined the faculty of Smith College. During World War II he served in the Army Air Forces (1942–46). In the Army, Gibson developed tests used to screen potential pilots. In doing so, he made the observation that pilots orient themselves according to the characteristics of the ground surface rather than through kinesthetic senses (Hochberg, 1994).
After the war he returned to Smith College before moving to Cornell University in 1949. He retired in 1972 from Cornell University.

II. What is Gibson famous for?
Gibson (1979) developed an ecological approach to the study of visual perception, which is a new and radical approach to the whole field of psychology that humans perceive their environment directly without mediation by cognitive process or by mental entities. According to his assertion of direct perception, there is enough information in our environment to make sense of the world (Gibson, 1977). Gibson (1979) said “direct perception is an activity of getting information from ambient array of light” (p. 147), and further called this a process of information pickup. That is, there is no need for mental processing since every object and event in the world have inherent meanings that are detected and exploited by humans. So his perception is based on information, not on sensations, which is in contrast with the conventional perspective of perception.
With such direct perception in mind, Gibson (1966) coined the term “affordances,” which are q...

... middle of paper ...

... to understand as to how learning can take place within technology-supported learning environments and what is the role of technology, with taking into account its functional value (i.e., affordances) that such technologies and environments have.

References
Gibson, J.J. (1966). The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Gibson, J. J. (1977). The theory of affordances. In R. E. Shaw & J. Bransford (Eds.), Perceiving, acting, and knowing: Toward an ecological psychology (pp. 67–82). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach To Visual Perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Hochberg, J. (1994). James Jerome Gibson. Biographical Memoirs, 63, 151-171.
James J. Gibson. (n.d.). In Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www. britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/233285/James-J-Gibson

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