Gibson’s Ecological Theory of Development and Affordances: A Brief Review

Abstract

This review describes the key ideas of the influential psychologist Eleanor J. Gibson, developed over 70 years of research with infants, children, adults, and a wide range of nonhuman species. Gibson’s ecological approach to perceptual learning and development describes how perception—extracting meaningful information from the environment to guide actions adaptively—improves with experience, the acquisition of new means of exploration, and the development of new perception-action systems (Adolph and Kretch). The Gibson’s ecological theory is a theory of human development that was created by American psychologist Eleanor J. Gibson during the 1960s and 1970s. Gibson emphasized the importance of environment and context in learning. Perception is important because it allows humans to adapt to their environment. Gibson stated that children learn to detect information that specifies objects, events, and layouts in the world that they can use for their daily activities (Miller, 2002).

2. Experimentation as a Learning Method

“…Gibson states that the behaviours of individuals, in the sense of action, depend on the knowledge they obtain through the perception of the affordances of the environment. 7 Such perception is the result of a direct process, which begins with the detection of specific information from the environment, such as patterns and regularities, which are named invariants. 8 Rejecting the idea of perception as a passive process, Pablo Covarrubias, paraphrasing J .…”

Revista de Psicología Volumen 12, Número 1, Enero - Junio 2022

“…La aproximación ecológica de Gibson al desarrollo perceptual describe cómo se extrae la información del ambiente para guiar las acciones adaptativamente, lográndose el desarrollo de nuevos sistemas de acción-percepción. La teoría de Gibson es más basada en la información visual antes que en la sensación visual (Khatibi, & Sheikholeslami, 2015).…”