User:Lisarock/sandbox

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 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.

The topic that recurs most consistently throughout Rock's entire career is. 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: He went on to apply this question to a wide range of phenomena, often with surprising results. 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. This finding challenged the Gestalt view that grouping factors operate very early in visual processing. 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.

It remains a concrete part of Rock's legacy. Rock also made substantial contributions to our understanding of reversible figures, induced motion, anorthoscopic perception, and.

In addition to his main work in perception,. 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.

,, and. To the consternation of the reductionists, In a series of experiments,

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, , , , and. . Five of the books were authored solely by Rock: ; ; ; ; and. 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. And he was honored in 1986 at an APA symposium entitled:. Rock spoke out against what he considered to be scientific foolishness, even if that meant confronting powerful vested interests such as the neuroscience movement. .

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
 * Perception 1996, volume 25