Home > Encyclopedia of Psychology > James Jerome Gibson

1904-1979
American psychologist known for his work on visual perception.

James Jerome Gibson proposed a theory of vision that was a first of its kind; he suggested that visual perception was the direct detection of environmental invariances, and that visual perception did not require inference or information processing.

Gibson was born in 1904 in McConnelsville, Ohio. He started his undergraduate career at Northwestern University. He transferred to Princeton University, where he earned his B.A. in 1925 and his Ph.D. in 1928. His dissertation research focused on memory and learning. During his career he taught psychology at Smith College between 1928 and 1949 and then went on to...