Lecture Series to Honor Fred Attneave
by Michael I. Posner
Why
a lecture to honor Fred Attneave? Certainly because
of the importance of his ideas to the development
of the fields of perception and cognition. But also
for his ability to attract a wide variety of experimental
psychologists to Oregon and for helping to make the
University of Oregon a major center for studies of
visual perception and information processing. Hyman,
Beck, Posner, Wickelgren and Stevens were among those
people I know to have been influenced in their decision
to come to Oregon by the presence of Fred Attneave.
Some, like me were attracted to Oregon by the promise
of a department, which hoped to link stimulus to knowledge
and awareness as well as to response. Others felt
that a place, which had been home to Attneave, must
be a good place to do psychology. It seems to me that
most of all, however, an Attneave lecture is appropriate
because of the kind of person Fred Attneave was and
the things he stoods for in our department and in
the field. Attneave was a person interested in a deep
understanding of his field, not merely its latest
or easiest fads. He was a person of high standards,
but also high tolerance for diversity and even idiosyncrasy.
Attneave was not one to attempt to impose any single
view or rigid orthodoxy. His goal was truth as best
he could grasp it. Truth, but with a certain skepticism
that anyone, even he, had already attained it.
Attneave's
early life was spent in Mississippi. He graduated
in 1942 from Ole Miss. and returned there is 1949-1951
as an Asst. Prof. His Ph.D. was from Stanford. His
research work on the dimensions of similarity was
to influence many researchers and shape not a few
careers. The effort to understand the dimensions of
similarity leads naturally to the study of spatial
metrics and, according to Roger Shepard, was a major
influence on his creation of multidimensional scaling.
Multidimensional scaling has been one of the major
methodological innovations in all of social science.
Closer to home, Attneave's similarity work led to
Hyman's exploration of the rules of dimensional combination
and to my own work with Keele on prototypes. Not bad
for "dissertation" research.
Attneave
spent 5 years as a research psychologist for the Air
Force from 1951-56. This was the period of information
theory in psychology and Attneave applied some of
its ideas to visual perception in his classical work
on the internal coding of visual form. Nearly 15 years
later when similar ideas, coupled with newer computational
algorithms, surfaced at MIT in the hands of Marr,
Stevens, Ullman and Hoffman they further transformed
visual science.
In
the meantime Attneave authored a steady stream of
important empirical and theoretical works. I found
of special value his textbook on information theory
in psychology, which made these ideas accessible to
my generation of researchers. His defense of the homunculus
remains a must read for those who believe psychology
might someday explain consciousness itself. Very exciting
new ideas on apparent motion, texture segmentation,
ambiguous figures and perception of the spatial world
behind the head were explored by Attneave in the 1970's
and 1980's. During this period he worked by himself,
closely with Jake Beck, or with such students as Dick
Olson, Gene Block, Tom Curlee, Cal Pierce, or others
at Oregon. Attneave was always highly sought after
as a critic or commentator both at Oregon and on the
national scene. Most of his colleagues can remember
taking a problem to Fred, who would tilt back, look
up at his ceiling and read off his ideas almost as
though they were actually there in the paint of Straub
Hall. I remember wondering whether if I came back
to the room I could still capture his insights by
gazing at the ceiling. Nationally, his commentary
paper in books edited by Rosenblith, Koch, Pomerantz
and Beck, to name a few were very significant contributions
to psychology. In many cases their importance extended
beyond the papers on which they were commentaries.
Over Attneave's entire career the emphasis was on
visual perception, but also upon visual knowledge
as captured by the idea of representation. Our understanding
of the representation of visual patterns, of music
and of the spatial world have been altered by Attneave's
studies and his ideas.
The
committee for the Attneave lecture was pleased to
have Roger Shepard start the series. Shepard was greatly
influenced by Attneave's work on similarity in his
development of multidimensional scaling. Their research
overlapped on many topics including apparent motion,
concept formation, and the study of generalization
and similarity and of music. We look forward to the
presence of former students of the department and
Fred's many friends and admirers on campus. We know
it will be an exciting event and the inaugural of
a series of lectures that will be a permanent reminder
of psychology at its very best.
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