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

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).