Gibson, James Jerome (1904–1979)

US psychologist who did influential and highly original work on visual perception. An outspoken critic of the German physiologist Hermann Helmholtz's notion that perception involves unconscious inferences from sense data and learning-based associations, he proposed that perceptual information is gained directly from the environment, without the need for intermediate processing.

Educated at Princeton, Gibson went on to teach at Smith College, Massachusetts, 1928–49, where he was influenced by Kurt Koffka (1886–1941), and at Cornell University 1949–72.

In his experimental work, Gibson dispensed with the use of two-dimensional, static images and instead explored the perception of motion in freely moving subjects under natural conditions, publishing his results in The Perception of the Visual World 1950. He went on to develop what he called an ecological theory of perception in Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems 1966.