Lorrin A. Riggs.

Presents the biography and lists the scientific publications of Lorrin A. Riggs, a recipient of the award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution in 1974. For his many basic and incisive studies of human vision. His ingenious contact lens electrode made possible the first reliable quantitative correlations of a subject's electroretinogram with his psychophysical responses. By another adaptation of the contact lens, he obtained highly precise and quantitative measures of both voluntary and involuntary eye movements, the latter proving to be essential for the maintenance of vision. His further electrophysiological studies of human peripheral color receptors and their concurrent evoked cortical responses laid the groundwork for his most recent studies of the color and form "channels" of the human perceptual system. All this bespeaks a mastery of visual science, its physiology and psychology in the grand tradition of Helmholtz. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Eye Movements and Vision.

Reviews the book, Eye Movements and Vision by A. L. Yarbus (Lorrin A. Riggs, translation editor; Basil Haigh, translator) (1967). As Riggs says in the introduction to Yarbus's book: The "book is primarily a monograph describing the original researches of the author." The book offers considerably more to the researcher in other areas of vision or visual perception. It discusses major considerations involved in the state of the art of performing eye movement studies. The range of the topics studied is extensive, including work on flicker, color, empty fields, stationary pictures, saccadic movements, nystagmus, visual pursuit of objects, to name a few. The book relates eye movement to a broad spectrum of visual phenomena. There are other plusses on the side of the book--the art work is very good, the translation by Basil Haigh, I found easy to read. In addition, there is a bibliography containing over a hundred and fifty references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Distinguished Scientific Contribution Awards for 1974.

Announces the awards recipients for the Distinguished Scientific Contribution for 1974 to Angus Campbell, Lorrin A Riggs, and Richard F. Thompson along with the names of the winners from the preceding years. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Distinguished Scientific Contribution Awards for 1976.

The Distinguished Scientific Contribution Awards are presented each year by the American Psychological Association at the Annual Convention. The award winners for 1976 are Beatrice C. Lacey, John I. Lacey, Theodore M. Newcomb, and Roger N. Shepard. The personal biographies and the professional writings of the award winners are presented, along with a listing of award recipients from preceding years. Each award winner is recognized with a check for $1,000 and an engrossed citation of his or her formal contributions to the development of scientific psychology. These psychologists have agreed, in accordance with established custom, to present addresses on some phase of their scientific work at the 1977 Convention. The presentation of awards was made by Richard F. Thompson, Chair of the Committee on Scientific Awards. Other members of the Committee are Dorothea Hurvich, Walter Mischel, Lorrin A. Riggs, Janet T. Spence, and Elaine Walster. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Distinguished Contribution for Applications in Psychology Award for 1976.

The American Psychological Association's Distinguished Contribution for Applications in Psychology Award was given this year for the fourth time. This award is presented to a person who has engaged in a program of research that is both systematic and applied in character. The recipient is presented with a check for $1,000 and an engrossed citation of their contributions. This year's award was won by Fred S. Keller. The award was presented by Richard F. Thompson, Chair of the Committee on Scientific Awards. Other members of the committee are Dorothea Hurvich, Walter Mischel, Lorrin A. Riggs, Janet T. Spence, and Elaine Walster. A listing of previous award winners is also provided. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Michael Turvey.

Announces Michael Turvey as a recipient of the 1974 Early Career Award, and presents his biography and list of scientific publications. His most important research contribution to date is his information-processing analysis of peripheral and central visual mechanisms. Turvey elucidated the processes involved in forward and backward masking by cleanly designed experiments utilizing noise and pattern masks presented either monoptically or dichoptically. Further, in his 1973 Psychological Review paper he integrated his results with a large body of literature on both visual theory and psychological experiments in terms of a model for the concurrent-contingent relationships between peripheral and central processes in the sequence of events leading from the onset of a visual display to recognition of a stimulus. In addition, he has been responsible for an extensive series of studies analyzing the function of release from proactive inhibition in short-term memory. He and his associates have contributed methods for studying primary or iconic memory, including an auditory analogue of Sperling's partial report procedure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ivo Kohler (1915–1985).

Presents an obituary for Ivo Kohler, known for his study of human visual perception. In his most important work, which was reported in 1951, he described the results of a number of studies in which he and other subjects wore various types of glasses and goggles with prisms and/or colored lenses. Kohler will be remembered in a number of ways: for his outstanding contributions to the study of perceptual distortion and reorganization; for approaching perceptual problems from highly ingenious vantage points, including cybernetics and information theory; and, for his dedication to the development of novel electronic gadgetry. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Disagreement with others, their credibility, and experienced stress.

"In a setting where the subject was confronted with disagreement from three other subjects, we varied both the degree to which he was in disagreement with them and his relative ability to make the visual judgments in question. He was confronted with… judgments… and found himself in disagreement with the others… . We determined, after each series, the internal consistency of his selfevaluation, his evaluation of the others, and the evaluation he guessed they had made of him. We also measured the stress the subjects experienced as reflected by changes in his skin conductance. Where there was a clear differential in ability, the subject evidenced both a relative diminution of stress and greater relative consistency of self-other evaluation." From Psyc Abstracts 36:04:4GE59G. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Art and Visual Perception.

Reviews the book "Art and visual perception," by Rudolph Arnheim (see record 1955-03680-000). In reading this book, one realizes why more psychologists have not been concerned with art. Art is a technical specialty in its own right and one must be expert both in psychology and in either creative art or the history of art to write on art. Arnheim's book brings the scientific knowledge of a trained psychologist to bear on the fundamental problems of visual art as it has developed through the ages. The discussion is always with reference to concrete works of art. Many original drawings, diagrams, and figures illustrate basic principles and important points. The writing is superb. The book is full of penetrating insights into questions of art and also into many problems of concern to the psychologist. Fundamentally this book is an argument against the usual art historian's approach, so well described by Arnheim as the purely subjective point of view, that what a person sees in a work of art "depends entirely on who he is, what he is interested in, what he has experienced in the past, and how he chooses to direct his attention". A book which reflects so well the author's urbanity, catholicity, and keenness of mind, as well as his technical grasp of the scientific and the artistic, is no small achievement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Fabio Metelli (1907–1987).

This article provides an obituary for Fabio Metelli, 1907-1987. The author notes that Metelli had a distinguished career in psychology, however he was best known for his innovative researches in visual perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bela Julesz (1928-2003).

Presents the obituary for Bela Julesz (1928-2003). Dr. Julesz is remembered for his contribution to the study of binocular vision, particularly his design of Julesz Random Dot Stereograms. In addition, he is noted for his research into the study of statistical properties of texture and the visual system's ability to apperceive variation in higher order statistics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Distinguished Scientific Contribution Awards for 1978: Julian Hochberg.

Julian Hochberg was presented a Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award for his insightful recognition that the central problem of human perception is to explain how perception is organized, and for highly significant theoretical contributions toward greater understanding of this central problem. Ranging from studies of the Ganzfeld to the cinema, he has ingeniously brought a wide variety of data to bear on his theories of perceptual organization, His convincing demonstrations of how the observer imposes his own organization on the sequence of visual information arriving at the retina has greatly enhanced our understanding of one of the oldest problems in psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Awards for Distinguished Scientific Contributions 1986: Gunnar Johansson.

Gunnar Johansson is one of the 1986 recipients of the Awards for Distinguished Scientific Contributions. Johansson receives this award because of his "penetrating theoretical insights into human visual perception, combined with ingenious and creative experimental research. His analysis of how environmental regularities are exploited by perceptual decoding principles anticipated current thinking about constraints and inferential processors. His experimental studies have provided much of the foundation for our understanding of motion and depth perception. Together with his students, he developed a substantial body of innovative research on perceptual vector analysis and on the perception of minimal events, biological motion, nonrigid motion, self-motion, and natural motions. His advanced thinking provides continuing leadership and inspiration for current researchers in visual perception." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Editorial.

This issue features an invited paper by Peter Dodwell, one of Canada's foremost experimental psychologists, who is internationally recognized for his research in visual perception. Dodwell has investigated issues related to spatial vision, motion perception, visual distortion and, recently, mechanisms of the well-known McCulloch Effect. In the article, Dodwell shows that, for all its diversity, his research program has been guided by a couple of central themes. The article reveals, in semi-autobiographical style, the influences that shaped his thinking and the special impact of W. C. Hoffman and his Lie Transformation Group Model of Neuropsychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Learning and attention: Brain and behavioural approaches the 1995 Banff Annual Seminar in Cognitive Science.

The Banff Annual Seminar in Cognitive Science (BASICS) was founded in 1982, and thus the meeting this past May marks the 14th anniversary of this conference. Many recent talks have stressed the importance of studying these processes in conjunction with each other. In keeping with this theme, the focus of BASICS 1995 was on recent neuropsychological, neurophysiological, and behavioural findings with respect to attention and learning. Further, many of the talks provided evidence in support of attentional organization centered around objects, rather than locations. The first talk, from world-renowned scientist Michael Posner, centered on his work involving neuroscientific approaches to the study of high-level skills such as reading. Steven Luck's talk also emphasized the use of multiple neurophysiological techniques to study high-level cognitive function, in this case, the binding of features. The talk by Lynn Robertson about her work in collaboration with Anne Treisman, switched to a focus on neuropsychological, rather than neurophysiological, findings regarding attention in humans. The last speaker of the first afternoon, Patrick Cavanagh, gave a talk replete with impressive visual demonstrations regarding his work in the behavioural analysis of spatial visual attention. The first speaker of the following morning session, Jeremy Wolfe, began his presentation by comparing his theory of visual search, which he calls Guided Search, to the more traditional theory of search, Feature Integration Theory (FIT), as proposed by Anne Treisman. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Theories of visual acuity and their physiological bases.

An orientation into the problem of visual acuity and of the size and distribution of retinal receptors precedes a discussion of the principal theories of visual acuity. The 2 static theories covered are Hartridge's and Hecht's, including a critique of Hetcht's theory where evidence is cited that fails to support his position. The 2 dynamic theories discussed are those of Weymouth and his colleagues, and of Marshall and Talbot. The Marshall-Talbot theory, accounting for visual phenomena other than acuity alone, is viewed as the best existing theory, and is evaluated in terms of the principal physiological mechanisms on which the theory is based. 84 references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Distinguished Contribution for Applications in Psychology Award for 1973: Conrad Kraft.

Announces that the first recipient of the Distinguished Contribution for Applications in Psychology Award is Conrad Kraft. He received this award for his program of research, in particular his work in aircraft night visual landing approaches. He was presented with a citation of his formal contribution to the application of psychology and also with a check for $1,000. APA established this award in order to honor individuals who have pursued a systematic program of research that has had an applied impact. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Note on the optimal length for visual interpolation.

When Ss were required to interpolate a scale division into tenths, Churchill was unable to confirm the "law" of constant visual angle. In this his result disagrees with other research on interpolation into fifths, which has become the basis of a forthcoming British Standard Institution recommendation. Dial designs based on the BSI recommendation have been validated on the shop floor. Possible causes for the difference in findings are discussed. From Psyc Abstracts 36:05:5LK41M. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Obituary: Richard D. Walk (1920-1999).

Memorializes Richard D. Walk, known for his work with Eleanor Gibson on the visual cliff and the development of depth perception. His research interests and contributions were diverse and included visual discrimination, research on concept formation, aesthetics, and social relations. He is best known for his work on perceptual development, and his 1981 book Perceptual Development still provides an excellent introduction and guide to the field. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The use of auditory cues in a visual search task.

Can an operator in a man machine system monitoring an instrument display do it better if he has both auditory and visual cues? 50 college students were assigned randomly to one of 5 conditions tested. A simulated man machine visual display was used for visual search tasks; a headset was used for sound. "In general, it appears that auditory cueing can be used effectively in conjunction with a visual search task." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)