Eleanor Jack Gibson: A Life in Science

Abstract

Eleanor Gibson's groundbreaking research on perception, learning, and development challenged the tenets of behaviorist and introspectionist psychology and extended the scope of Helmholtzian psychophysics to forge a unified experimental, comparative, and developmental science of perception and learning. Gibson faced obstacles throughout her career: She held a full-time faculty position, with her own lab and students, for only 3 years. Nevertheless, she was remarkably productive and happy. Her rigorous, innovative experiments on adults, children, and animals brought new life to the study of perception and learning. Consistently and wisely, she viewed humans and animals as lifelong learners with intrinsic talents and penchants for perceiving, exploring, and discovering environmental structures and affordances. Her experiments placed the study of development at the center of interdisciplinary research on the origins and nature of knowledge and intelligence, inspiring current studies of the processes that give rise to knowledge in human minds, brains, and machines.