Course:MDIA300/James Gibson

  

James Gibson

Overview

James J. Gibson (1904-1979) was an American psychologist recognized for developing ecological psychology, an interdisciplinary field that examines the psychological connection between humans and the natural world. His key ideas (affordances and the education of attention) have become useful tools for interpreting how humans interact with environments, both natural and, more recently, technological. In media studies, Gibson's theories support the understanding of how humans interact, behave, and navigate within various spaces, including real-world environments, social media platforms, interfaces, and virtual spaces.

Background

Gibson started his undergraduate studies at Northwestern University, then transferred to Princeton University, where he majored in philosophy. Gibson then pursued his PhD in psychology, achieving a dissertation focused on memory of visual forms, acquired in 1928.

He then was enlisted in the U.S Army in 1941, serving as the director of a unit for the Army Air Forces’ Aviation Psychology Program during World War II. During this time, he was interested in the effect of flying an aircraft on perception. After the war ended, he returned to Smith College, then later moved to Cornell University in 1949 where he continued to teach and conduct research until he retired in 1972.

Major contributions and works

Gibson is devoted to the research in nature and the principle of perception through ecological lenses. His major contributions are through the three works that he published on the topic.

The Perception of the Visual World (1950)

Gibson separates the perception of the visual world into two problems - that of “the substantial or spatial world” and “the world of useful and significant things to which we ordinarily attend.” The former includes colors, textures, surfaces, edges, slopes, shapes, and interspaces while the latter consists of our more familiar elements like objects, places, people, signals, and written symbols. The former is more or less consistent throughout time, while the latter is often changing with our situations. In the book he presented the ground theory - Perception needs to be anchored upon a common variable in the spatial world.

Gibson argues that perception relies on stimulation rather than on meaning or mental elaboration. This stimulation not only includes present stimuli, but also includes past experience and feelings - in other words, memory. He believes that what we perceive is the combination of what we visualize and what we feel.

In the book, Gibson mainly discussed how perception relies on stimulation and how spatial perception is important to the perception of the world around humans. This laid the basis for his theories in later works about the relation between material and perception. 

The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966)

Gibson challenges the view that sees senses as a channel for sensation and proposes that senses are a system of perception. He objects that senses must depend on “conception and belief” and instead is able to obtain information about the world without the intervention of an “intellectual process.”

In the book, he demonstrated this by analyzing how nerves and vision function and suggested that to find how sense truly works, researchers should look outside the brain system as well. He also argues that one does not have to learn to acquire data through sensing by perception - the skill - or the function - comes with the perceptual system born with us.

The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979)

Gibson continues to explore the relationship between perception and material and presents the idea of affordance, one of his main theories in the book. Through the explanation of ecological optics and perception-related experiments, he claims that perception is the direct, continuous pickup of invariant information and is not constructed from sensations.

Affordances

Affordances are the action possibilities the environment offers to an organism and are “measured relative to the animal,” which means that they are unique for each organism. Gibson explained how organisms perceive their environment in terms of the possibilities of what they can do with it. He emphasizes that perception is an interaction with the environment, not a mental representation.

However, these possibilities occur on a special occasion that is related to the observer’s physical and cognitive capacities. Thus, affordances are therefore somewhat rational, neither purely objective nor purely subjective.

Influence on Media Theory

Media Ecology

Media scholars continue to use Gibson’s ideas to understand how technology shapes and is shaped by human perception. Media ecology, the study of how media and communication technologies influence human perception, culture, and society, mirrors Gibson’s emphasis on perception being influenced by mediated environments.

Human-Computer Interaction and Design

Gibson’s theory inspired Don Norman’s adaptation of affordances in The Design of Everyday Things (1988), which became a fundamental concept in HCI (Human–Computer Interaction) and UX design (User Experience design).

Legacy

Gibson’s ecological view of perception continues to influence contemporary psychology, media theory, and design, especially his idea of affordance, which has shaped interface and UX designs. Even though his focus on perception as media ecology and anthropology is inspired by the surrounding environment.

Gibson’s ecological approach redefines perception as a more direct and active approach, showing the relationship between organism and environment and locating the structure in the world itself.

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