The creator of Affordances

I am here would like to share about the Creator of Affordances - James Jerome Gibson

An American psychologist, born in McConnelsville, Ohio, who received his Ph.D. from Princeton University's Department of Psychology. In his classic work, The Perception of the Visual World (1950), he rejected the fashionable behaviorism and the classical approach of Hermann von Helmholtz and others to perception for a view based on his experimental work. His theories pioneered the idea that observers sample information from the outside visual world using an active perceptual system rather than passively receiving input through their senses and then processing this input to obtain a construction of the world. For Gibson, the world contained "invariant" information that was directly accessible to the perceptual systems of humans and animals which are attuned to pick up this information through "direct perception."

His first job was at Smith College, where he taught psychology from 1928 to 1949. There he met Kurt Koffka, the Gestalt psychologist. Gibson never accepted Gestalt psychology, but he did agree with Koffka that the problems of perception were the central problems of psychology (Neisser 1981). Also at Smith, Gibson met Eleanor Jack, a brilliant psychology student. They married on September 17, 1932. They had two children, James J. and Jean Grier. Eleanor became not only his wife but also his assistant, sharing his views on how to conduct research and his interest in the psychology of perception.

Gibson's theory was that of direct perception, which means that humans directly perceive their environment through stimulation of the retina. Traditionally, and especially by Gestalt psychologists, perception was believed to be indirect. According to this theory, humans do not directly perceive their environment. It is only through sensory stimulation over time that we learn what is in our environments, and that we perceive much more than mere sensory input. Although Gibson's theory was met with much criticism, it did help advance the study of perception. Through his theory of ecological optics, the study of perception shifted from laboratory-created situations to real environmental tests. His ideas also pushed further research into the areas of vision and perception. Gibson died in 1979.

Gibson's greatest desire, according to his own writing, was "to make a contribution to knowledge" (Boring and Lindzey 1967, 141). There is no question that he did just that.

Gibson's Affordances

• Action possibilities in the environment in relation to the action capabilities of an actor
• Independent of the actor's experience, knowledge, cultre, or ability to perceieve
• Existence is binary - an affordance exists or it does not exist.