An Odyssey in Learning and Perception: (Learning, Development and Conceptual Change)

In the field of psychology, beginning in the 1950s, Eleanor J. Gibson's ideas and experiments revolutionized the study of development. She developed the field of perceptual learning with a series of studies that culminated in the seminal work, "Perceptual Learning and Development". More recently, Gibson has been a driving force in the shift from mentalistic models, or intellectual stages, toward an ecological view of development, involving function and action. "An Odyssey in Learning and Perception" documents a 50-year intellectual expedition in the area of learning and perception - always with an eye to combining them in 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 Perception" provides a portrait of the growth and later flourishing of experimental psychology in 20th-century America. It is a personal account of a gifted scientist, who because of her sex faced formidable obstacles during much of her career.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 Experimental psychology in the 30s (1932-1942): bilateral transfer of the conditioned response in the human subject, J.J. Gibson and G. Raffel; retention and the interpolated task, with james J. Gibson; sensory generalization with voluntary reactions; a systematic application of the concepts of generalizaton and differentiation to verbal learning; retroactive inhibition as a function of degree of generalization between tasks; retrospect and prospect - are theories recycles?. Part 2 Comparative research on learning and development (1952-1970): the role of shock in reinforcement; the effect of prolonged exposure to visually presented patterns on learning to discriminate them, with R.D. Walk; the effectiveness of prolonged exposure to cutouts vs. painted patterns for facilitation of discrimination; behaviour of light and dark reared rats on a visual cliff, with R.D. Walk and T.J. Tighe; development of perception - discrimination of depth compared with discrimination of graphic symbols, reprinted from J.C. Wright and J. Kagan (eds.); the development of perception as an adaptive process, Eleanor J. Gibson; retrospect and prosepct - comparative psycholoogy and animal cognition. Part 3 Perception - psychophysics to transormations (1954-1959): the effect of training on absolute estimation of distance over the ground, with R. Bergman; the effect of prior training with a scale of distance on absolute and relative judgments of distance over ground, with R. Bergman and J. Purdy; distance judgment by the method of fractionation, with J. Purdy; continuous perspective transformations and the perception of ridig motion with J.J. Gibson; motion parallax as a determinant of perceived depth with J.J. Gibson, O.W. Smith and H. flock; retrospect and prospect - psychophysics to computation. Part 4 Perceptual learning (1955-1969): perceptual learning - differentiation of enrichment? with J.J. Gibson; reply by L. Postman - association theory and perceptual learning; what is learned in perceptual learning? a reply to professor postman; perceptual learning; perceptual development and the reduction of uncertainty; trends in perceptual development; retrospect and prospect - the coming of age of perceptual development. Part 5 Years of significance - research on reading (1965-1977): learning to read; confusion matrices for graphic patterns obtained with a latency measure with F. Schapiro and A. Yonas; the ontogeny of reading; perceptual learning and the theory of word perception; how perception really develops: a veiw from outside the network in D. Laberge and S.J. Samuels (eds.); reading in retrospect - perception, cognition or both?. Part contents.