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Boston, etc., Houghton Mifflin, 1950. 4to. Original reddish-brown full cloth with black lettering to spine and front board. A bit of wear to extremities. Several pencil-underlinings in the text (presuambly Postman's). XII, (2), 235, (1), (6, -index) pp. Richly illustrated throughout. With presentation-insription to front free end-paper, as well as Leo Postman's ownership signature. Excellent presentation-copy of the first edition of the most important work on perception since Helmholtz, Gibson's seminal classic, in which he rejected the theory of behaviorism and pioneered the idea that animals "sampled" information from the "ambient" outside world. Inscribed to Gibson's close friend, professor of psychology Leo Postman, one of the most dominant theoreticians of human memory: "To Leo Postman/ You know all this already/ Jim Gibson". American psychologist James Jerome Gibson (1904 -1979) is considered one of the most important 20th century psychologists in the field of visual perception. His classic work from 1950, "The Perception of the Visual World", Revolutionized the way of understanding visual perception and was responsible for the turn away from the otherwise dominating behaviorism. It is in this, his pioneering main work, that he presents his revolutionizing idea of animals "sampling" information from the outside world that surrounds them.Gibson is also famous for coining the term "affordance", which is the quality of an object or an environment that allows for an individual to perform an action (- a for the time unusually Aristotelian way of viewing objects, an example would be a tie which "affords" tying, or a knob that "affords" twisting). As Gibson's theories in psychology in general, the concept of "affordance" has been extremely influential in a large variety of fields: perceptual psychology, cognitive psychology, environmental psychology, industrial design, human-computer interaction (HCI), interaction design, instructional design and artificial intelligence."The principal subject of this book is the visual perception of space. The essential question to be asked is this: How do we see the world around us? The question is at once a theoretical one, a factual one, and a practical one. The theories to be considered have to do with the history of philosophy and psychology. The applications extend to art, aviation, photography, and mountain-climbing. This book, however, is not a historical survey of the problem, nor a record of existing facts, nor a discussion of the applications. The intention is to formulate a consistent approach to the problem - a way of getting new facts and making new applications. [.] The writer has elected to study psychophysics rather than psychophysiologybecause he believes that it offers the more promising approach in the present state of our knowledge. [.] A psychophysics may sound to some readers like a contradiction in terms. This book undertakes, however, to justify and make possible such a science. " (Gibson, in the Preface, pp. (vii)-viii). As is seen from Gibson's own preface, he himself viewed the work as revolutionary, which Hochberg also notes in is piece on Gibson: "I believe [the] book was the most important work on perception since that of Helmholtz's volume three of Physiological Optics, approximately a century earlier. It was a comprehensive approach to the perception of surfaces, things, and movement through the environment, promarily the outcome of his observations and thoughts about the visual task involved in flying and landing aircraft. [.] The book was clearly intended to initiate a revolutionary moment. I believe that intention has, just as clearly, been successful. Some forty years after its publication, the book is still widely cited and controversial, the direct source of substantial current experimental research, and the starting point for more extreme departures from what had been the established way of thinking about perception." (Julian Hochberg, "James Jerome Gibso.
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