Summary

In the field of psychology, beginning in the 1950s, Eleanor J. Gibson's ideas and experiments revolutionized the study of development. She nearly single-handedly developed the field of perceptual learning with a series of brilliant studies that culminated in the seminal work, Perceptual Learning and Development.More recently, Gibson has been a driving force in the profound shift from mentalistic models, or intellectual stages, toward an ecological view of development, involving function and action. An Odyssey in Learning and Perceptiondocuments a fifty-year intellectual expedition in the areas of learning and perception-always with an eye to combining them in a theory of perceptual learning and development, a theory that may be broadly applicable to humans and nonhumans, young and old. It brings together Gibson's scientific papers (including classic studies in perception and action) spanning her work from the 1930s to the present, along with a personal essay that touches on the questions and concerns that guided her research. Gibson introduces each paper to show why the research was undertaken and the significance of the question addressed, and concludes each section with comments linking the findings to later developments and pertinent questions being addressed at the present time. An Odyssey in Learning and Perceptionprovides a valuable portrait of the growth and later flourishing of experimental psychology in twentieth-century America. It is also an exhilarating personal account of a gifted scientist, who because of her sex faced formidable obstacles during much of her career.

Author Biography

Eleanor J. Gibson is Susan Linn Sage Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, Cornell University.

Series Foreword
Foreword
Introduction
Experimental Psychology in the Thirties (1932-1942)
Bilateral Transfer of the Conditioned Response in the Human Subject
Retention and the Interpolated Task
Sensory Generalization with Voluntary Reactions. J. Exp. Psychol., 1939, 24, 237-253
A Systematic Application of the Concepts of Generalization and Differentiation to Verbal Learning. Psychol. Review, 1940, 47, 196-299.
Retroactive Inhibition as a Function of Degree of Generalization between Tasks. J. Exp. Psychol., 1941, 28, 93-115.
Retrospect and Prospect: Are Theories Recycled?
Comparative Research on Learning and Development (1952-1970)
The Role of Shock in Reinforcement. J. Comp. Physiol. Psychol., 1952, 45, 18-30
The Effect of Prolonged Exposure to Visually Presented Patterns on Learning to Discriminate Them, with R. D. Walk. J. Comp. Physiol. Psychol., 1956, 49, 239-242
The Effectiveness of Prolonged Exposure to Cutouts vs. Painted Patterns for Facilitation of Discrimination. J. Comp. Physiol. Psychol., 1959, 52, 519-521
Behavior of Light- and Dark-Reared Rats on a Visual Cliff
Development of Perception: Discrimination of Depth Compared with Discrimination of Graphic Symbols. Reprinted from
The Development of Perception as an Adaptive Process
Retrospect and Prospect: Comparative Psychology and Animal Cognition
Perception: Psychophysics and Transformations (1954-1959)
The Effect of Training on Absolute Estimation of Distance over the Ground
The Effect of Prior Training with a Scale of Distance on Absolute and Relative Judgments of Distance over Ground
Distance Judgement by the Method of Fractionation
Continuous Perspective Transformations and the Perception of Rigid Motion
Motion Parallax as a Determinant of Perceived Depth
Retrospect and Prospect: Psychopysics to Computation
Perceptual Learning (1955-1969)
Perceptual Learning: Differentiation or Enrichment?
Reply by L. Postman: Association Theory and Perceptual Learning. Psychol. Rev., 1955, 438-446.
What Is Learned in Perceptual Learning? A Reply to Professor Postman. Psychol. Rev., 1955, 62, 447-450.
Perceptual Learning. Annual Review of Psychology, 1963, 14, 29-56.
Perceptual Development and the Reduction of Uncertainty. In Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Psychology, 7-17, Moscow, 1966
Trends in Perceptual Development. Excerpts from Chapter 20 of Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development (pp. 450-472). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969.
Retrospect and Prospect: The Coming of Age of Perceptual Development
Years of Significance: Research on Reading (1965-1977)
Learning to Read. Science, 1965, 148, 1066-1072
A Developmental Study of Visual Search Behavior
Confusion Matrices for Graphic Patterns Obtained with a Latency Measure
The Ontogeny of Reading. American Psychologist, 1970, 25, 136-143.
Perceptual Learning and the Theory of Word Perception. Cognitive Psychology, 1971, 2, 351-368.
How Perception Really Develops: A View from outside the Network
In
Retrospect and Prospect: Perception, Cognition, or Both?
Perceptual Development from the Ecological Approach (1972 to the present)
The Senses as Information-Seeking Systems
(London) Times Literary Supplement, 1972, June 23, 711-712
Seeing as Thinking: An Active Theory of Perception
(London) Times Literary Supplement, 1972, June 23, 707-708.
Perception as a Foundation for Knowledge: Thoughts Inspired by Papers of Frailberg and Bellugi
Discussion prepared for the Lenneberg Symposium, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., May 1976
Perception of Invariants by Five-Month-Old Infants: Differentiation of Two Types of Motion
Development of Knowledge of Visual-Tactual Affordances of Substance
Child Development, 1984, 55, 453-460.
Excerpts from The Concept of Affordances in Development: The Renascence of Functionalism
The Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology, Vol. 15
Detection of the Traversability of Surfaces by Crawling and Walking Infants
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1987, 13, 533-544.
Exploratory Behavior in the Development of Perceiving, Acting, and the Acquiring of Knowledge
Excerpts from Annual Review of Psychology, 1988, 39, 1-41.
Epilogue: Prospects for a New Approach to Perceptual Learning
References
Author Index
Subject Index
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Supplemental Materials

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.