James Gibson

For more information on James Jerome Gibson, visit Britannica.com.

(1904–79). Distinguished American experimental psychologist, whose work on visual perception was and remains unusually influential. Following an appointment at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, where as a young professor he was considerably influenced by Kurt Koffka, who had recently emigrated from Germany, Gibson for many years ran a major department at Cornell University. His life work was investigating visual perception of form and motion, his early work including the discovery that distorting lenses produce negative (reversed) adaptation to curvature even with free eye movements. But his main work was to challenge the approach of Helmholtz and suggest a very different account of perception.

Gibson first of all moved away from the traditional experiments with pictures, and what is seen with a single static eye, towards the observer moving around freely and viewing moving objects in natural conditions. He was led to this by considering pilots landing on fields, where the 'flow lines' of motion are important for seeing the landing point and estimating height and speed. From such considerations of 'visual flow', and texture gradients, he developed what he called 'Ecological Optics'. This almost ignored retinal images, and active brain processes, in favour of regarding perception as 'picking up information from the ambient array of light'. This is very different from the Helmholtzian notion of perceptions as Unconscious Inferences from sensory data and knowledge of objects. Gibson tried to explain object perception by supposing that some 'higher-order' features are invariant with motion and rotation and are 'picked up' with no perceptual computing or processing being required. His search for such invariances, and for just what the visual system uses under various conditions has proved useful for developing computer vision. His general philosophy, however, that perception is passive pick-up of information, present in the world, is hard for Helmholtzians, who stress the importance of knowledge of objects to provide information enhancing sensory signals, to follow. His important books are: The Perception of the Visual World (1950) and The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966). Much of his work was done with his wife Eleanor, a distinguished developmental psychologist.

(Published 1987)

— Richard L. Gregory

Bibliography
• Reed, E. S. (1988). James J. Gibson and the Psychology of Perception.

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