User:Susan Blackmore/sandbox

Tomasz Stanisław Trościanko (1953-2011) (Tom) was born in Munich, Germany, of Polish parents, Anna and Wiktor Trościanko. As a stateless child, aged nine, he travelled alone to England to attend Fawley Court Polish school in Henley-on-Thames. He studied Physics at the University of Manchester and a subsequent job with Kodak led to his finding an enduring interest in colour vision and to studying for a PhD in optometry and visual science City University, London. From 2000 onward he was Professor of Psychology, first at the University of Sussex and then at the University of Bristol, where he remained until his death in 2011.

Career
In 1970, after leaving school, Tom worked for British Steel as a lab technician before taking a degree in Physics at The University of Manchester. A job at Kodak led to his finding an enduring interest in colour vision and to studying for a PhD in optometry and visual science at City University, London, supervised by Charles Pagham and awarded in 1978.

In 1979 as a postdoctoral researcher he got a job at the University of Bristol where he worked for many years with Richard Gregory. For the year 1985-1986 Tom, his wife and young family, moved to Germany where Tom held a Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to work at the University of Tübingen Eye Hospital on isoluminance and its effects on the perception of form and motion.

He became a lecturer at the University of Bristol in 1991 and spent most of the rest of his career there. He also worked at the IBM UK Scientific Centre in Winchester and in 2000 briefly held a chair at the University of Essex. Between 2000 and 2002 he was Professor of Psychology at the University of Sussex. Returning to Bristol in 2002, he became Professor of Psychology in the Department of Experimental Psychology and founded the Cognition and Information Technology Research Centre (COGNIT), promoting an interdisciplinary approach to cognitive neuroscience. In 2007 he founded the Bristol Vision Institute.

Personal Life
In September 1977 he married psychologist, Susan Blackmore, and in 1979 they moved to the University of Bristol where he worked for many years as a postdoctoral researcher with Richard Gregory. Their daughter Emily was born in 1982 and their son Jolyon in 1984. Using their children as experimental subjects, they devised a system called BabyTape which enabled the baby to pull a cord to select which music they liked to listen to, the results showed that they preferred nursery rhymes to Status Quo. Tom and Susan were divorced in July 2009.

For some years Tom lived on his narrowboat, Lancer, in the floating harbour at Bristol, opposite the quay where the replica of The Matthew was being built. Later he moved to a house in High Kingsdown and for the last five years of his life his partner was an artist, Carol Laidler, whom he had met, typically, in Amsterdam.

Research
His research interests were many and varied, ranging from colour vision in apes and birds to artificial vision systems for CCTV cameras and visual search in complex scenes including for camouflage detection. With Susan Blackmore, he contributed to the discovery of change blindness and even worked on why misjudgments of probability lead people to believe in the paranormal. He also contributed to attempts to create a conscious robot with Iain Gilchrist and Owen Holland (funded by the EPSRC Adventure Fund). Other collaborators, from many different fields, included C. Alejandro Párraga and David Tolhurst on computational modelling, and Innes Cuthill and Julian Partridge on bird vision. In the last year or so before he died, Tom had also become very interested in the area of empirical aesthetics, specifically with reference to the feeling of 'presence' as affected by factors like screen size when watching movies.

He was chief editor of the journal Perception for over 20 years, and the driving force behind the launch of its open-access sister journal i-Perception , long involved in the Applied Vision Association and became its secretary in 2003. A frequent and popular speaker at the European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP) he and Susan Blackmore organised its 11th meeting in Bristol in 1988. He was renowned for never taking the easy route to conferences but turning each trip into an adventure that might involve cars, trains, skis, his camper van, motorbike, and especially boats. A legacy he left to the Applied Vision Association was used to honour his contributions to vision science and especially his extraordinary travels, by creating The Tom Trościanko Award to support a student to travel to ECVP in a way that Tom would have enjoyed.

Death
Tom Trościanko died of heart failure on 16 November 2011 in Amsterdam, on his way to give lectures in Germany.

TomFest, a celebration of his life and work, was held on 30 March 2012 , involving a boat trip around Bristol harbour, and a series of short talks by colleagues, students, friends, and family, followed by dinner, wine-tasting, and music at the University of Bristol’s Wills Memorial Building.

On 2 September, a symposium on ‘Space, colour, natural vision, and conscious robots’ was held at ECVP 2012 in Alghero, Sardinia. The special exhibition, IllusoriaMente (meaning both illusorily and the illusory mind), was dedicated to the memory of the late Prof. Richard Gregory and the late Prof. Tom Trościanko.