User:Lisarock/sandbox

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Hello my name is Lisa and I am the daughter of the scientist "Irvin Rock", the proposed subject of this article.

I am asking for help to write this article from all interested Wikipedia participants.

In this article I would like to provide a biography for Irvin Rock, an experimental psychologist who studied visual perception and proposed an explanation for such anomalous visually perceived phenomenon such as the Moon Illusion. Aside from this work he also studied many other visual-perceptual phenomena and conducted many research projects. He wrote and published numerous scientific articles and books, one of which was written for the layperson entitled: Perception published by Scientific American.

The following biography has been created from an obituary* that was written for Irvin Rock by a friend and colleague of his, Alan Gilcrist. I will approach the author of this obituary for permission to use some of its content in my proposed article, however I plan on doing so before I actually post the article on Wikipedia “proper”

Respectfully,

Lisa Rock (September 13, 2010 Berkeley, CA)

Irvin Rock was born on July 7,1922 and grew up in New York City. Insert some information on dad’s parents and brother, and boyhood experiences. He received his BA in psychology in 1947 and his MA in 1948, both from the City College of New York. A student of Hans Wallach[1], an experimental psychologist who helped explain human vision and hearing, he completed his PhD with highest honors in 1952 from the New School for Social Research. He taught at the New School and at Yeshiva University, later moving to Rutgers University in 1967 where he worked first at the Newark campus and later at New Brunswick. He officially retired from Rutgers in 1987, and moved to California where he continued his very active research and teaching career as an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley until his death on July 18, 1995.


During his long career, Rock worked on a broad range of topics. Perhaps the most widely known work of Rock is the series of experiments he conducted with Lloyd Kaufman[1] on the moon illusion. That work decisively overturned the generally accepted explanation of that time ?, and demonstrated that the moon illusion is a logical outcome of the rules by which the visual system processes size and distance in general. Several of those experiments were conducted on the rooftop of a New York City building, with an artificial moon that could be projected to appear anywhere in the sky</ref>.

The topic that recurs most consistently throughout Rock's entire career is [2]. Rotate a square by 45° and it appears to be a diamond, not a square. This work began with his doctoral dissertation, and includes an authoritative book and many papers, several published shortly before his death. It was in this work that he first applied the kind of question that he would turn into a powerful research tool: [3] He went on to apply this question to a wide range of phenomena, often with surprising results. [4] [5] Rock applied this approach to the Gestalt grouping principles in several experiments. The Gestaltists had observed that black dots on a piece of paper appear to form groups based on their proximity to one another. [6] This finding challenged the Gestalt view that grouping factors operate very early in visual processing. [7] Under Rock, his student and colleuge Alan Gilcrist showed that it is the perceived adjacency between two surfaces in the environment that is crucial, not the adjacency of their retinal images.

[8] [9] It remains a concrete part of Rock's legacy. [10] [11] [12] [13] Rock also made substantial contributions to our understanding of reversible figures, induced motion, anorthoscopic perception, and [14].

In addition to his main work in perception, [15]. The intense debate and enmity aroused by that work mark it as an important landmark in the post-Gestalt development of cognitive theories of learning. The controversy he raised there has not been resolved so much as set aside.

[16], [17], and [18].[19] To the consternation of the reductionists, [20] In a series of experiments, [21]

Rock became a central figure in the vigorous debate over direct versus indirect perception and an outspoken critic of the reductionism that has characterized much of the work in the tradition of sensory physiology. A colleuge Arien Mack noted, Rock's cognitive-inferential theory of perception is the most articulate and complete version of an indirect theory of perception that we have. Irvin Rock had a deep appreciation for the scientific method: He was known to be impatient with wordy debates and anxious to get on with the observation, experience, and conduction of experimental tests. To others Rock seemed at times to literally think in terms of experiments. A colleuge said, "Irvin Rock approached issues with an almost childlike simplicity. He had an extraordinary ability to take a fresh look at an issue, often seeing something important in what other people considered merely obvious." Lloyd Kaufman has written in the preface to his book Sight and Mind: "By [Rock's] example I learned to recognize boldness, creativity, and independence in scientific thought".

Rock is remembered by collegues,friends and family members to be a man of great character, kindness and generosity; having a manner that was always dignified, yet warm and caring, with an intellectual modesty that is rare. He was appreciated as a gifted teacher and a superb mentor. He instilled the highest scientific values in his students. Many of Rock's students have distinguished themselves in the field of perception and several other well-known figures consider themselves honorary students of Rock, such has been their experience with him.

Rock served in the infantry during World War II. During fighting in Europe near the end of the war, Rock vowed to himself that, if he survived, he would put his life to constructive use. In the next half-century he published [22], [23], [24], [25], and [26]. [27]. Five of the books were authored solely by Rock: [28]; [29]; [30]; [31]; and [32]. He wrote a final book, written with colleuge Arien Mack on their joint studies of inattention, will appear soon.

Rock was an elected fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists and a two-time recipient of [33]. And he was honored in 1986 at an APA symposium entitled: [34]. Rock spoke out against what he considered to be scientific foolishness, even if that meant confronting powerful vested interests such as the neuroscience movement. [35].

It is not possible to survey all the topics on which Rock worked, so wide is the range.

Irvin Rock died on 18 July 1995 after struggling for six months with pancreatic cancer. He is recognized as a man of wide theoretical influence. He is survived by his wife Sylvia, and five children: Peter, Alice, Lisa, and David Rock, and Rayna Shilling-McCallum.

Alan Gilchrist, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

  1. ^ Lloyd Kaufman
  2. ^ the dependence of the perceived form of a figure on its orientation
  3. ^ Is it egocentric orientation or environmental orientation that determines the perceived form?
  4. ^ Max Wertheimer had argued that the stroboscopic motion one sees in the space between two alternately flashed dots is based on a kind of short circuit between the two locations of stimulation in the neural tissue
  5. ^ By asking observers to move their eyes in synchrony with the flashing dots, Rock, with Ebenholtz, showed conclusively that the perceived motion depends on whether the flashes appear to come from two locations in the environment, not whether they stimulate two locations on the observer's retina.
  6. ^ By the technique of rotating the paper to an angle oblique to the observer's line of sight, Rock, working with Brosgole, showed that it is the perceived distance between dots that underlies the groupings, not the distance between the dots in the retinal projection of the display.
  7. ^ Rock's mentor, Hans Wallach, had shown that the perceived blackness or whiteness of surfaces depends on the intensity of light reflected by that surface relative to the intensity from its adjacent neighbor.
  8. ^ Work on anorthoscopic perception done with Halper and others showed the extent of the discrepancy between the retinal pattern and what is perceived; even for something as fundamental as form perception, an extended retinal image is not necessary.
  9. ^ The test of whether a perceptual factor operates at the level of the retinal image or at the level of the perceived environment has become a basic and powerful tool of psychophysics.
  10. ^ Irvin Rock's research also established the dominance of vision over touch.
  11. ^ It had often been argued that the ambiguity in retinal images is resolved, at least in early visual experience, by using the sense of touch.
  12. ^ Submitting the issue to empirical test, Rock demonstrated that, when visual and tactile information contradict one another, it is vision that dominates, not touch.
  13. ^ And vision dominates touch to such a degree that it literally changes the way things feel to the touch, a phenomenon that Rock referred to as visual capture.
  14. ^ the role of attention in perception
  15. ^ several experiments he published on one-trial learning in the late 1950s had an significant impact on research in the field of learning
  16. ^ Many of Rock's theoretical ideas foreshadowed important developments in computational vision, including his early proposal that form perception is based on an internal description
  17. ^ his ideas about the role of frames of reference in shape perception
  18. ^ his principle of avoidance of coincidence in perceptual outcomes
  19. ^ During his career, Rock became perhaps the leading advocate of the position that visual perception is based, as Helmholtz had suggested, on unconscious inferences.
  20. ^ Rock repeatedly showed the thought-like character of perception and the difficulty of reducing it to the processing of relatively local information by peripheral mechanisms.
  21. ^ Rock showed that the perceived motion normally caused by the alternate flashing of two lights does not occur if, because of other information in the context, the flashing can be perceptually attributed to occlusion and disocclusion by other surfaces.
  22. ^ 70 journal articles
  23. ^ 16 chapters in books
  24. ^ 8 articles in Scientific American
  25. ^ 9 entries in encyclopedias
  26. ^ 9 books
  27. ^ Three of these books were edited by Rock
  28. ^ The Nature of Perceptual Adaptation
  29. ^ Orientation and Form
  30. ^ An Introduction to Perception
  31. ^ The Logic of Perception
  32. ^ Perception
  33. ^ the Research Scientist Award from the Public Health Service
  34. ^ "Computation, Inference, and Perception: Theoretical Essays in Honor of Irvin Rock"
  35. ^ During the one-trial learning controversy, vigorous and effective efforts were made by influential learning theorists to suppress Rock's work
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