Richard Gregory

Richard L. Gregory ( born July 24, 1923 in London, † 17 May, 2010 Bristol) was a British psychologist and neuroscientist, known for studies on visual perception.

Life

Gregory was the son of the astronomer Christopher Gregory, the first director of the observatory of the University of London, and therefore grew early on with optical instruments.

Gregory was active in World War II in the Royal Air Force in the field of radar - immediately afterwards he held much attended public lectures on radar on behalf of the Air Ministry. From 1947 he studied at Cambridge University ( Downing College) Experimental Psychology and Philosophy ( Master's degree 1950). After that, he was from 1950 scientists in the group of Applied Psychology, University of Cambridge, partly also in the Royal Navy for the development of experiments of escape from sunken submarines. In 1953 he was Demonstrator and then Lecturer in Cambridge. In 1962 he became a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In 1967 he went to Edinburgh University as a professor of bionics. There he founded with Christopher Longuet- Higgins and Donald Michie, the Faculty of artificial intelligence and perception. 1968 to 1970 he was chairman of the faculty.

From 1970 to 1988 he was director of the Laboratory for Brain and Perception ( Brain and Perception Laboratory) in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Bristol; Since 1988 he was a professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology.

He has been a visiting professor at UCLA (1963 ), MIT (1964 ), New York University (1966 ), the University of California, San Diego, visiting scientist at Bell Laboratories ( 1973) and Osher Visiting Fellow at the Exploratorium in San Francisco ( 1989).

Work and honors

Gregory is known for his research on visual perception and its illusions. He also designed several new instruments, such as a camera that corrects atmospheric turbulence at telescopes, and a " Solid Imaging Microscope ".

In 1978 he founded the Exploratory Hands-on science center in Bristol, the first such science museum in the UK, and was the Chairman of the Board ( and scientific honorary director ) to 1991 and from 1991 to 1999 its director. He also wrote and starred in numerous television and radio programs for the BBC, among others, were his Royal Institution Christmas Lectures ( Christmas Lectures, in a long tradition since Faraday ) transferred 1969/70 ( The Intelligent Eye).

In the 1960s, he also directed ( with the rank of colonel in the U.S. Air Force) a Special Senses Laboratory, which should work out at the Moon maneuvers altered perception conditions the Apollo astronauts.

With Jean Wallace, he examined the rare case of an adult who, starting from total blindness his sight regained ( " Recovery from early blindness - a case study ", Cambridge 1963). With students, he examined the primitive visual mechanism ( in the type of scanning mechanism of a television camera ) of the copepod Copilia Quadrata who lives in the depths of the Gulf of Naples.

In 1972 he founded the journal Perception. He is the author of numerous books, especially known was his book " Eye and Brain", first appeared in 1967.

In 1991 he was awarded the Michael Faraday Award of the Royal Society. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh ( 1969), the Royal Society (1992 ), the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society of Arts. In 1983 he received a doctorate ( D.Sc. ) from the University of Bristol. In addition, he has won several honorary doctorates.

Writings

  • Eye and brain - to the psychophysiology of vision, Rowohlt 1991 English Original: Eye and Brain - the psychology of seeing, Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1966, 5th edition. Oxford University Press 1997 ( and Princeton University Press 1998)
  • The Intelligent Eye, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1970 ( from the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures )
  • Publisher: The Oxford Companion to the Mind, Oxford University Press 1987.
  • Mind in Science: a history of Explanations of psychology and physics, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1981.
  • Odd Perceptions, Methuen, 1986, Routledge, 1988 ( essays )
  • Even Odder Perceptions, Routledge 1994.
  • Mirrors in Mind, Freeman / Spektrum and Penguin, 1998.
  • With Ernst Gombrich: Illusion in Nature and Art, 1973 ( catalog of an exhibition from 1970 to 1973 shown in the Institute of Contemporary Arts and in San Francisco and New York, co-organizer was Roland Penrose )
  • Concepts and mechanisms of perception, Duckworth, London, 1974 ( collection of his essays )
May 17 Downing College, Cambridge H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins Integrated Authority File
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