Biographical Memoirs Volume 63 (1994) / Chapter Skim
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7. James Jerome Gibson
7. James Jerome Gibson
Pages 150-171
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From page 151... ...
James Gibson was a man of great personal charm who was cleeply and cheerfully engaged by ideas and who wrote and clebatect clearly, forcefully, and tirelessly. He was born on January 27, 1904, in McConnelsville, a small town in southeastern Ohio.
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From page 152... ...
Holt's was a sophisticated and elegant motor theory of consciousness in which the forms and contents of cognition are themselves aspects of bodily responses to the world. Undertaken in this context, Gibson's doctoral dissertation, in 193S, refuted a recent thesis by Wulf (192212 reporting that subjects' memories of visual forms changed spontaneously toward simpler and more compactly organizec!
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Eleanor.Jack, who was herself to become a major figure in the psychology of perceptual learning anct clevelopment, an occasional collaborator, and a constant colleague. They hacI two chiTciren, James Terome.
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He went from captain in 1942 to lieutenant colonel in 1946. He was director of the Motion Picture Research Unit in the Aviation Psychology Program, the motion picture unit that was to develop visual aptitude tests for the screening of pilot applicants, and that toward the end of the war was given the immensely important question of how a training film conveys the information that film is best able to present.
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From page 155... ...
Above all and throughout, however, he wanted a scientific cliscipline that wouIcl start to answer, as directly and immecliately as possible, the perceptual question of why things look as they do not simple patches of color in the laboratory, or line figures in demonstrations, but the things and layouts of the world in which we move and act, walk and strive and fly. In 1950 Gibson publishecl The Perception of the Visual World.
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From page 156... ...
Maxwell. The major purpose of psychophysical research was to analyze the fundamental human sensory capacities, or sensations, and their corresponding neural bases, such as the three cone types successfully predicted by the Young-Helmholtz theory.
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In general, it seemec! most parsimonious, and closest to what was believed true of neurophysiology when Gibson's first book was being written, that no new prewired nervous structures, beyond the receptor level of rocts and cones, were needed to account for these abilities: the depth cues were supposedly learned from experience with the world, through mechanisms of associative learning that provided for learning in general; and object properties, like size, are perceived only after these depth cues are used to interpret the retinal image by means of nonsensory processes, like Helmholtz's still popular speculations about "unconscious inference," that perform what amount to problem-solving
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From page 158... ...
Gibson's book offered plausible candidates for such higher-order variables; for example, the gradient of texture-clensity along the ground specifies the slant of the surface to the line of sight, it specifies the distance of the object standing on the ground, and it specifies the object's size as well, with no inference needed for any of thesehence, the need for, and possibility of, a global psychophysics of objects and events. There were, of course, precedents for some aspects of these assertions.
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the Howard Crosby Warren Mecial from the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 1952, was elected president of the Eastern Psychological Association in 1959, received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association in 1961, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1967. These honors were given primarily in recognition of the global psychophysics en cl the revolutionary approach Gibson
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From page 160... ...
For the viewer, patterns of stimulation have been "enriched" through associations accrued in the course of perceptual learning. In 1955 lames and Eleanor Gibson argued that, because the information needed to account for perception is already present in the light at the eye, perceptual learning consists not of such associative aciclitions but of a process of differentiation, a sharpening of the aspects of the changing flux of light to which the identification occurs.
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From page 161... ...
As to the first book, the virtually unbridgeable conceptual gap between retinal points of classical psychophysics, and the surfaces and distances of the real worIct, was finessed by the global psychophysics Gibson proposed in 1950. By the time of his second book, in 1966, the hopeless complexity of obtaining a stable world from moving eyes and heat!
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journal cleclicatec3 to the study of event perception; an honorary degree bestowed on Gibson by Uppsala University in 1976; a flood of articles in the name of ecological psychology (and many in opposition as well)
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Kalish, "Perception of Translational Leading from Optical Flow," fournal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (in press)
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Orientation in visual perception: The recognition of familiar plane forms in differing orientations. Psychol.
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38:432-68. 1944 History, organization, and research activities of the Psychological Test Film Unit, Army Air Forces.
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Does motion. perspective independently produce the impression of a receding surface?
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New York: Holt. Visually controlled locomotion and visual orientation in animals and men.
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Caviness. Persistent fear responses in rhesus monkeys to the optical stimulus of "looming." Science 136:982-83.
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In The Organ of Human Information Processing: Symposium von XVII Int. Congress fur Psychology, ed.
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7:3-9. 1972 A theory of direct visual perception.
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1979 The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
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