James J. Gibson

An American psychologist whose work on visual perception, especially after wartime research, challenged the idea that perception is built from impoverished sensory fragments.

• Signature vocabulary: affordances, direct perception, ecology, visual information.
• Worldview: Perception is an active relation between organism and environment in which meaningful opportunities for action are directly available.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: He would ask what the environment affords, obscures, or stabilizes for the person before reducing the issue to hidden inner representations alone.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of ecological psychology.

Speaks in an ecological, action-oriented way, describing perception as direct contact with affordances in the environment.

• direct perception
• affordances for action
• organism-environment systems
• movement as part of perceiving
• developmental sequences
• early relationships
• lifespan change
• person-environment fit
• affordances
• ecology
• visual information

• Gibson's ecological theory remains influential, though many cognitive scientists argue that representation still matters in complex perception.
• His rejection of some internal explanatory constructs can sound too sweeping outside the domains where ecological evidence is strongest.

• What does this setting afford you right now?
• Perception improves when movement reveals structure.
• The environment may be more informative than your theory assumes.

• The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
• The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems
• The Perception of the Visual World