Eleanor J. Gibson was an American psychologist renowned for her work in perceptual learning and development, particularly in infants and children. She is best known for the visual cliff experiment, which investigated depth perception.

• Born Eleanor Jack on December 7, 1910, in Peoria, Illinois. Some sources say she was born in Boston.
• She came from a middle-class family; her father was a businessman, and her mother was a Smith College graduate.
• She received a B.A. in 1931 and an M.S. in 1933 from Smith College.
• She earned her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1938, under the advisement of Clark Hull. Robert Yerkes rejected her request to work in his chimpanzee lab because she was a woman.

• Early Career: She taught at Smith College from 1932-1941 and 1946-1949.
• Cornell University: In 1949, she joined Cornell University, where her husband, James J. Gibson, had been offered a professorship. Due to anti-nepotism rules, she initially worked as an unpaid research associate. She became a professor in her own right in 1965. In 1972, she was named the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Psychology, the first woman to be appointed to an endowed professorship at Cornell. She retired from Cornell in 1979.
• Visual Cliff Experiment: In 1960, Gibson and Richard Walk published their findings on the "visual cliff," an experiment designed to investigate depth perception in infants and animals. The experiment demonstrated that both human and animal infants could perceive depth by the time they could crawl or move, suggesting depth perception is innate. Initially, rats were tested in the visual cliff experiment before human babies.
• Perceptual Learning Theory: Gibson's theory of perceptual learning emphasizes active exploration and differentiation of stimuli in the environment. Perceptual learning involves increasing specificity of discrimination, optimization of attention, and increased economy of information pick-up and search for invariance.
• Ecological Approach: Gibson, along with her husband James J. Gibson, promoted an ecological approach, emphasizing the importance of the environment in shaping perception and behavior. The concept of affordances, or opportunities for action offered by the environment, is central to this approach.
• Reading Research: Gibson also studied reading acquisition, arguing that learning to read involves detecting and differentiating patterns in written language. She introduced the concept of 'reading readiness,' suggesting that children need to develop certain perceptual skills before they are ready to read.

• American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award (1968)
• National Medal of Science (1983, awarded in 1992)
• The Century Award (1967)
• Lifetime Achievement Award (1992)

• Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development (1969)
• The Psychology of Reading (with Harry Levin, 1975)
• An Odyssey in Learning and Perception (1991)
• Perceptual Learning and Development: An Ecological Approach (with Anne Pick, 2000)
• "The Visual Cliff" (with Richard Walk, 1960)

• She married fellow psychologist James J. Gibson in 1932.
• They had two children: James J. and Jean Grier.
• Gibson died on December 30, 2002, in Columbia, South Carolina, at the age of 92.

Eleanor J. Gibson's work significantly impacted the field of developmental psychology, influencing research on perception, motor development, and cognitive psychology. Her theories and findings continue to be relevant in contemporary research and education.