Biography
Eleanor Jack Gibson, born Eleanor Jack, was born on December 10, 1910 in Peoria, Illinois. She was born to a businessman father and a mother without a career. However, her mother graduated higher education from Smith College. She followed her mother’s example and studied Psychology at Smith College, where she met a professor Jack J. Gibson. She would later marry Jack J. Gibson in 1932 and become Eleanor Jack Gibson. She began her master’s work in Psychology at Smith College, and then transferred her studies to Yale University. She initially intended to do comparative research at Yale under the supervision of Robert Yerkes, but after his policy of a female free laboratory, she performed experimental work with Clark Hull. She received her doctorate from Yale University in Psychology in 1938. Gibson began her career as an assistant professor at Smith College in 1940, along with her husband; they later moved to Cornell University. At the time, Cornell had a policy which prohibited spouses from both being faculty members, so James took a teaching position while Eleanor became a research associate. Eleanor Jack Gibson died on December 30, 2002 in Columbia, South Carolina, at the age of ninety two.
Work/ Professional Life
Eleanor Jack Gibson is most famously known for her work with the “visual cliff” and the perception of infants. In her visual cliff experiment, Gibson studied the perception of infants aged 6 to 14 months. This experiment began while Gibson was working at Cornell University, examining rats in the lab. The “visual cliff” was constructed of a piece of glass over patterned paper. On one side of the cliff the paper was directly under the glass, and on the other side the paper was several feet below the glass. After her study with the rats, Gibson and her experiment partner moved to a sample of thirty six infants. The infant’s mothers were stationed on the far side of the experiment, as incentive for their children to move to the “cliff” side of the experiment. Of the twenty seven children who moved from the middle of the cliff, only three children were enticed by their mothers to move to the simulated “cliff” side of the experiment. Eleanor Gibson would further her research in perceptual learning as her career went on. She wrote a book on perceptual learning, and when she was finally awarded a spot as professor, she furthered her experimentation with infants and their perception of surfaces and objects.
Eleanor Jack Gibson is a shining example of a woman who, throughout her life worked to further the research of Psychology. She is one of the leading researchers throughout history is perceptual learning. Before her research and experimentation, methods for studying the development in infants were very limited, and there was very little relevant research on the subject. She opened up the floor to this research, providing her peers and colleagues more ways in which to study infants and to study perceptual learning. Because of her work, perceptual learning is now considered a distinct research focus.
Eleanor Jack Gibson was acknowledged in many ways for her work. In 1968 she was awarded the G. Stanley Hall Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions, and in 1986 was awarded the American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Science. More, she was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1992, and award rarely given to psychologists.
Relevance
Perhaps it was not specifically Gibson’s work that is relevant to this Psychology of Women class, as there was no distinction of work with gender found in the research of her work, but her ability to push through adversity in pursuit of her work. One of the many encounters that Eleanor Jack Gibson had throughout her career was with Robert Yerkes, a man whom did not permit women to work amongst him in his laboratory. Gibson would have many of these encounters throughout her lifetime. Instead of complying to the male-dominated sphere of psychological research, Gibson found ways in which to person her research and pursue her passion, even if it meant putting aside her own true desires for research. She worked amongst other male psychologists, even if it meant researching something other than what she was interested in. Without Gibson’s persistence, she possibly would have never gotten her own lab in which she was able to make her major contributions to the study of Psychology. Gibson faced great adversity throughout her life and her career directly because of her gender.
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