Perceiving the Affordances is a personal history and intellectual autobiography of Eleanor Gibson, the groundbreaking research psychologist who was influential in the founding of the theory of perceptual development. It is also a biography of her husband, James J. Gibson, who was a major perceptual theorist and the founder of the ecologically-oriented theory of perception. This is the story of their lives together and how each came to make particular contributions. This book is of interest to people who study perception, perceptual development, infancy, developmental psychology, and the history of psychology.

"Perceiving the Affordances" is a personal history and intellectual autobiography of Eleanor Gibson, the groundbreaking research psychologist who was influential in the founding of the theory of perceptual development. It is also a biography of her husband, James J. Gibson, who was a major perceptual theorist and the founder of the ecologically-oriented theory of perception. This is the story of their lives together and how each came to make particular contributions. This book is of interest to people who study perception, perceptual development, infancy, developmental psychology, and the history of psychology.

The essential nature of learning is primarily thought of as a verbal process or function, but this notion conveys that pre-linguistic infants do not learn. Far from being "blank slates" that passively absorb environmental stimuli, infants are active learners who perceptually engage their environments and extract information from them before language is available. The ecological approach to perceiving-defined as "a theory about perceiving by active creatures who look and listen and move around" was spearheaded by Eleanor and James Gibson in the 1950s and culminated in James Gibson's last book in 1979. Until now, no comprehensive theoretical statement of ecological development has been published since Eleanor Gibson's Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development (1969).

In An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning and Development, distinguished experimental psychologists Eleanor J. Gibson and Anne D. Pick provide a unique theoretical framework for the ecological approach to understanding perceptual learning and development. Perception, in accordance with James Gibson's views, entails a reciprocal relationship between a person and his or her environment: the environment provides resources and opportunities for the person, and the person gets information from and acts on the environment. The concept of affordance is central to this idea; the person acts on what the environment affords, as it is appropriate.

This extraordinary volume covers the development of perception in detail from birth through toddlerhood, beginning with the development of communication, going on to perceiving and acting on objects, and then to locomotion. It is more than a presentation of facts about perception as it develops. It outlines the ecological approach and shows how it underlies "higher" cognitive processes, such as concept formation, as well as discovery of the basic affordances of the environment. This impressive work should serve as the capstone for Eleanor J. Gibson's distinguished career as a developmental and experimental psychologist.

In this book, two psychologists apply principles of cognitivepsychology to understanding reading. In this book, two psychologists apply principles of cognitive psychology to understanding reading. Unlike most other books on the subject, this one presents a consistent theoretical point of view and applies it to the acquisition of reading and what the skilled reader does. The first part of The Psychology of Reading covers perceptual learning, the development of cognitive strategies, the development of language, the nature of writing systems, and an extensive review of the research on word recognition. In the second part of the book, the authors look closely at abilities that children bring to school before learning to read. They describe the acquisition of initial reading skills and transition to skilled reading, the nature of the reading process in adult readers, and the ways people learn from reading. The book's third part takes up questions people frequently ask about reading-such as reading by deaf children, dyslexia, the influence of nonstandard dialects on learning to read, comparison of reading achievement across different nations and different languages, and the debatable virtues of "speed reading." The authors conclude that reading cannot be understood simply as associative learning-that is, the learning of an arbitrary code connecting written symbols and their sounds. Reading involves higher-level mental processes such as the discovery of rules and order, and the extraction of structured, meaningful information.

An Odyssey in Learning and Perception documents 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. In the field of psychology, beginning in the 1950s, Eleanor J. Gibson 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. An Odyssey in Learning and Perception brings together Gibson's scientific papers, including difficult-to-find or previously unpublished work, along with classic studies in perception and action. Gibson introduces each paper to show why the research was undertaken and concludes each section with comments linking the findings to later developments. A personal essay touches on the questions and concerns that guided her research.