James J. Gibson

James Jerome Gibson was an American psychologist and is considered one of the most important contributors to 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. James Jerome Gibson was born to Thomas and Gertrude Gibson in McConnelsville, Ohio, on January 27, 1904. 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 frequently, moving throughout the Dakotas and Wisconsin until they finally settled 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 how the visual world would appear 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 seemed 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 studying the visual perception of landing and flying planes.

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. 

His doctoral dissertation focused on the memory of visual forms, and he received his Ph.D. in 1928. E. B. Holt, who William James taught, inspired Gibson to be a radical empiricist. Holt was a mentor to Gibson. While Gibson may not have read William James’ work directly, E. B. Holt was the connecting factor between the two. Holt's molar behaviorism theory brought James's radical empiricism philosophy into psychology. 

Heft argues that Gibson's work was an application of William James’. Gibson believed that perception is direct and meaningful. He discussed the meaning of perception through his theory of affordances. Gibson also was influenced by James' neutral monism; nothing is solely mental or physical. 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.