Gibson, James J

Gibson, James J(erome)

(born Jan. 27, 1904, McConnelsville, Ohio, U.S.—died Dec. 11, 1979, Ithaca, N.Y.) U.S. psychologist and philosopher. He taught at Smith College (1928–49) and Cornell University (1949–72). He is best known for his adherence to realism and his extensive experimental studies of visual perception explicating that view. In his first major work, The Perception of the Visual World (1950), he proposed that perception is unmediated by associations or information processing but rather is direct. He argued for an examination of the organism's dynamic world in search of the information that specified the state of that world. He developed his position in The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966) and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979). His followers organized the International Society for Ecological Psychology. Eleanor J. Gibson was his wife.