Holt who advocated new realism, and Herbert S. While enrolled at Princeton, Gibson had many influential professors including Edwin B.

Gibson began his undergraduate career at Northwestern University, but transferred after his freshman year to Princeton University, where he majored in philosophy. Later in life, Gibson would apply this fascination to the study of visual perception of landing and flying planes. These experiences sparked Gibson's interest in optic flow and the visual information generated from different modes of transportation. When Gibson looked behind the train, the visual world would seem to contract. In the direction of the train, the visual world would appear to flow in the same direction and expand. Gibson recalled being absolutely fascinated by the way the visual world would appear when in motion. When Gibson was a boy, his father would take him out on train rides. Because his father worked on the railroad, Gibson and his family had to travel and relocate quite frequently, moving throughout the Dakotas and Wisconsin until they finally settled down in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette. Gibson's father worked for Wisconsin Central Railroad, and his mother was a schoolteacher. He was the oldest of three children and had two younger brothers, Thomas and William.

James Jerome Gibson was born in McConnelsville, Ohio, on January 27, 1904, to Thomas and Gertrude Gibson. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked him as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs conscious visual perception, and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or processing. James Jerome Gibson ( / ˈ ɡ ɪ b s ən/ January 27, 1904 – December 11, 1979) was an American psychologist and is considered to be one of the most important contributors to the field of visual perception.

Visual perception definition