caption doctoral_advisor death_date death_place birth_place influences awards field work_institutions birth_date known_for image article_title name alma_mater
eleanor gibson - keynote address - 1993 aps convention clark hull 30 december 2002 columbia , south carolina peoria , illinois james j. gibson national medal of science -lrb- 1992 -rrb- psychology cornell university 7 december 1910 visual cliff , differentiation and enrichment of embedded structures eleanor gibson -lrb- 1993 -rrb- . jpg eleanor j. gibson
 eleanor jack gibson smith , 1933 -rrb- yale university -lrb- ph.d. , 1938 -rrb- college -lrb- b.a. , 1931 -rrb- -lrb- m.s.
eleanor j. gibson

eleanor jack gibson -lrb- december 7 , 1910 -- december 30 , 2002 -rrb- was an american psychologist .
among her contributions to psychology , the most important are the study of perception in infants and toddlers .
she is popularly known for the `` visual cliff '' experiment in which precocial animals , and crawling human infants , showed their ability to perceive depth by avoiding the deep side of a virtual cliff .
along with her husband james j. gibson , she forwarded the concept that perceptual learning takes place by differentiation .
gibson is credited with creating the gibsonian or ecological theory of development , which centers on the concept of affordances and how children learn to perceive them .
according to life magazine in 1959 , the `` visual cliff '' was `` a wooden table from the edge of which strong plate glass extended ... children were put on the table top and coaxed to crawl out over the glass .
but when they got to the edge of the cliff and looked down almost all of them quickly withdrew .
even their mothers ' most persuasive urgings could not get them out . ''
similar studies were done with animals , including rats and kittens .
the visual cliff findings indicated that perception is an essentially adaptive process , or as dr. gibson put it , `` we perceive to learn , as well as learn to perceive . ''
in 1982 , she was invited to beijing to teach chinese psychologists about recent theories and techniques of research .
she was elected a fellow of the american academy of arts and sciences in 1977 .
in 1992 , eleanor gibson was awarded the national medal of science .
a `` review of general psychology '' survey , published in 2002 , ranked gibson as the 74th most cited psychologist of the 20th century , in a tie with paul e. meehl .
