Eleanor Jack Gibson
Eleanor Jack was born on December 7, 1910 in Peoria, Illinois. She attended Smith College where she focused on Psychology and met her future husband Jack J. Gibson, who was one of her professor’s. Eleanor Jack became his teaching assistant while in enrolled in the master’s degree program in psychology. Eleanor Jack and Jack J. Gibson married in 1932. Eleanor Jack Gibson went on to Yale University to continue her graduate work with Clark Hull, whose main interest was learning. Gibson received her doctorate from Yale in 1938 and returned to Smith College as an instructor, earning the position of assistant professor in 1940. In 1949 the couple moved from Smith College to Cornell University.
	Eleanor Jack Gibson’s most famous work is that involving the “visual cliff”. Her study involved the perception of infants, aged 6 to 14 months. The infants were placed on the center platform and their mothers would stand at either end of the platform successively and call to their children. Nearly all the infants refused to crawl out over the glass on the “cliff” side, but nearly all of them were quite happy to crawl across the glass on the shallow side. From this study Gibson concluded that depth perception is developed at a very early age.
Eleanor Jack Gibson also wrote several books that focused on her work. One book involved the study of her “visual cliff” titled An odyssey in Learning Perception (1991). Her last book was titled Perceiving the Affordances: A Portrait of Two Psychologists (2002), which provided a personal, autobiographical memoir of the separate but interesting careers of her husband and herself. Eleanor Jack Gibson received many awards over the course of her career. She was awarded the G. Stanley Hall Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions in 1968. In 1986 she was given the American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Science. Recognition of her contributions were also evident in the publications documenting her influence. Eleanor Jack Gibson died on December 30, 2002 in Columbia, South Carolina at the age of 92. She inspired students and colleagues alike to explore problems in innovative and creative ways. Her legacy will stimulate psychological theory and research for many decades to come. 378 words Bibliography Kristen Scheuermann Professional Writing