In what ways did the Eleanor Gibson help shape psychology? Specifically, what ideas did the psychologist propose and develop? How did these ideas...

Eleanor Gibson (1910–2002) was an experimental psychologist whose groundbreaking work focused on the area of perceptual learning. She posited that we can learn to perceive different objects from the differentiation of stimuli and that we don't need to be conditioned through coming into contact with stimuli to discriminate between different objects. Her theories were in opposition to the behavioral theories of her day, which posited that a person had to be conditioned through contact with...

Eleanor Gibson (1910–2002) was an experimental psychologist whose groundbreaking work focused on the area of perceptual learning. She posited that we can learn to perceive different objects from the differentiation of stimuli and that we don't need to be conditioned through coming into contact with stimuli to discriminate between different objects. Her theories were in opposition to the behavioral theories of her day, which posited that a person had to be conditioned through contact with a stimuli to learn the difference between different stimuli. She shaped psychology by introducing the idea that the environment alone can shape our perceptions.

In the 1950s, she conducted the famous "cliff-walk" experiment, in which babies were placed on a glass top table that simulated a drop off. The infants showed hesitation in climbing across what looked like a visual cliff, showing innate depth perception. Her experiments, conducted along with R.D. Walk at Cornell, showed that the environment provides stimuli to help infants develop their sense of perception. She also applied her theories about perceptual learning to the study of how children learn to read and write.

Her ideas, including the Gibsonian theory of ecological development that she formulated with her husband, changed psychology and our understanding of human thought and behavior because they emphasized the importance of the environment (rather than behavioral conditioning) in shaping people's perceptions and stated that perception was critical in helping people navigate their environments. She also shaped psychology by being a female pioneer in a world that was largely male. For many years, she had to work as a research assistant without pay before finally being made a professor at Cornell.