Top 11 Quotes & Sayings by James J. Gibson

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American psychologist James J. Gibson.
Last updated on April 20, 2025.
James J. Gibson

James Jerome Gibson, was an American psychologist and one of the most important contributors to the field of visual perception. 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. 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. Woodworth.

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.
Hence it is that the shape of something is especially meaningful.
The perception of what a thing is and the perception of what it means are not separate, either. — © James J. Gibson
The perception of what a thing is and the perception of what it means are not separate, either.
The meaning or value of a thing consists of what it affords.
The abstract analysis of the world by mathematics and physics rests on the concepts of space and time.
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.
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.
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.
A mechanical encounter or other energy-exchange may cause tissue damage.
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.
The heart of the problem is not so much how we see objects in depth, as how we see the constant layout of the world around us. Space, as such, empty space, is not visible, but surfaces are.
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