James J. Gibson
Psychologist & Founder of Ecological Psychology
關於
James Jerome Gibson (1904–1979) was an American psychologist who fundamentally challenged how we understand perception. After earning his Ph.D. at Princeton and working with the U.S. Air Force during WWII studying pilot perception, he spent three decades at Cornell developing his ecological approach — arguing that organisms perceive the world directly through structured information in the environment, not through internal mental reconstruction. His final work, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), introduced the concept of affordances and became one of the most influential texts in cognitive science, reshaping fields from robotics to UX design.
主要貢獻
- Pioneered ecological psychology and the theory of direct perception
- Introduced the concept of affordances — relational properties between organisms and environments
- Developed the theory of optic flow, explaining how visual motion specifies movement through space
- Influenced embodied cognition, robotics (Rodney Brooks), and UX design (Don Norman)
- Authored The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), a foundational text in cognitive science
