James J. Gibson Quotes

• What a thing is and what it means are not separate, the former being physical and the latter mental as we are accustomed to believe.

  James J. Gibson

• There has been a great gulf in psychological thought between the perception of space and objects on one hand and the perception of meaning on the other.

  James J. Gibson

• The perception of what a thing is and the perception of what it means are not separate, either.

  James J. Gibson

• The meaning or value of a thing consists of what it affords.

  James J. Gibson

• The human young must learn to perceive these affordances, in some degree at least, but the young of some animals do not have time to learn the ones that are crucial for survival.

  James J. Gibson

• The abstract analysis of the world by mathematics and physics rests on the concepts of space and time.

  James J. Gibson

• Psychology is still trying to explain the perception of the position of an object in space, along with its shape, size, and so on, and to understand the sensations of color.

  James J. Gibson

• I also assume that they are not simply the physical properties of things as now conceived by physical science. Instead, they are ecological, in the sense that they are properties of the environment relative to an animal.

  James J. Gibson

• Hence it is that the shape of something is especially meaningful.

  James J. Gibson

• A mechanical encounter or other energy-exchange may cause tissue damage.

  James J. Gibson

James J. Gibson (10)

Birth:	27th January, 1904
Death:	11th December, 1979
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Psychologist

About

James Jerome Gibson was an American psychologist, born in McConnelsville, Ohio, who received his Ph.D. from Princeton University's Department of Psychology, and is considered one of the most important 20th century psychologists in the field of visual perception. In his classic work The Perception of the Visual World he rejected the then fashionable theory of behaviorism for a view based on his own experimental work, which pioneered the idea that animals 'sampled' information from the 'ambient' outside world. He studied the concept of optical flow. According to Gibson, one determines the optical flow using the pattern of light on the retina.

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