The 34th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Psychophysics will take place from 20th – 24th August 2018 in Lüneburg, Germany.
For details of the meeting please visit the official website www.fechnerday2018.de.
Sophia Arndt, a doctoral candidate at Galway University, created a Fechner Day group on LinkedIn. She would like to invite those interested in psychophysics to join. The group address is:
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13558958
Robert (Bob) Teghtsoonian was not only a founding member of the International Society for Psychophysics. From the very beginning, his continuous and lively engagement in the progress of the Society was outstanding: No one else had a stronger formative influen
ce on the ISP. It was one of his major concerns to encourage young scientists and to facilitate their integration into the scientific community. Bob never put himself at the center of things. And as everybody experienced his honest interest in people and their ideas, people around him felt secure and indeed were. Bob had the uncanny ability to create an atmosphere for open and unprejudiced exchange of ideas. Whatever the occasion, he always found the right words, the right wine, and the right humor along with his inimitable welcoming smile. We experienced much of this atmosphere at the Fechner Days. I also believe it was largely due to his efforts that the Fechner Days did not degenerate into vanity but remained one of the very few academic meetings which facilitated a personal exchange of thoughts from an equal stance in an accepting atmosphere. We will miss his constant attentiveness and support, his refreshing contributions and scientific impulses.
Text: Fritz Müller
To sign a Guest Book or express condolences you may go to: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/gazettenet/obituary.aspx?pid=186047240
Ragnar Steingrimsson, UCI IMBS associate project scientist, dies at 50
Ragnar Steingrimsson, associate project scientist in the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at University of California at Irvine, passed away in his sleep on May 22. He was 50.
Steingrimsson received his Ph.D. in cognitive sciences from UCI in 2002 and went on to complete postdoctoral work on the Irvine campus and at New York University before starting work full time at UCI’s Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences as an assistant project scientist. Alongside renowned cognitive scientists Duncan Luce and Louis Narens, Steingrimsson pursued research on subjective evaluation of sensory intensities – how people understand loudness, brightness, pain and other senses. At the time of his death, he was working to provide scientific evidence for a comprehensive theory of Luce’s that explained and integrated judgments of intensity within and across sensory domains.
“As a graduate student in cognitive sciences, Ragnar did his doctoral dissertation under the guidance of Duncan,” says Louis Narens, cognitive sciences professor. “Duncan developed new mathematical techniques to study how people understand and experience senses – and Ragnar developed experimental techniques to test Duncan’s theories. Together, they published many papers in top psychology journals and developed important new methodologies for conducting psychophysical research.”
Among them: Psychological Review, Journal of Mathematical Psychology, Journal of American Psychology, and Attention, Perception & Psychophysics.
Steingrimsson also studied under cognitive sciences professors David Laberge and Jean-Claude Falmagne where he focused on attention and psychophysics and knowledge spaces, respectively. Throughout his postdoctoral positions at UCI, his research was continuously funded by the National Science Foundation and Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
Steingrimsson was an avid runner and a native of Iceland. He earned a certificate in French language at the University of Paris, Sorbonne in 1989, and then headed to the University of Copenhagen, Denmark where he earned his bachelor’s in film and communication in 1991 and his bachelor’s in computer science in 1992. He came to Chapman University in Orange, California where he earned an MFA in 1994 and his master’s in English in 1995. He then joined the UCI Department of Cognitive Sciences graduate program, earning his master’s in 1998 and his Ph.D. in 2002.
During his 22-year association with UCI, Steingrimsson also worked remotely as a senior research scientist for the Northwest Evaluation Association (2013-16), an adjunct professor of psychology for New York University (2004-05), and a research scientist at Ohio State University (2017).
Text provided by Kimberly A. Jameson
The 33rd annual meeting of the international society for Psychophysics will be held in Fukuoka, Japan, 22-26 October 2017. Please note down the key dates of the conference:
See more information at the official website.
Diana Kornbrot, University of Hertfordshire
Gene Galanter, an early and enthusiastic member of ISP, has died peacefully after a long and heroic struggle with cancer, during which he never gave up on his scientific projects and promotion of science. He was one of the key modern founders of the cognitive psychology revolution started shortly after WWII.
He fought in WWII, a strong influence on his later life. He earned the French Legion d’Honeur, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and Croix de Guerre with Palm, and Presidential Unit Citation.
On return from France he graduated with a BA from Swarthmore followed by a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Collaboration with S. S. Stevens at Harvard produced the enduring Ms. Ratio Scales and Category Scales for a Dozen Perceptual Continua. A fellowship at Stanford led to his influential book Plans and the Structure of Behavior with George Miller and Karl Pribram. Collaboration with Robert Bush and Duncan Luce led to the three-volume Handbook of Mathematical Psychology. Although not easy reading, these led the way in making explicit and testable models of perception and decision-making. He worked at Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and as Chair of the Psychology Department at the University of Washington. His final move was to Columbia University where he founded the Psychophysics Laboratory and was active and innovative in theoretical research, as well as running several US government research projects.
He was an inspiring teacher. His popular undergraduate seminars continued until he was well into his 80s. He created a blueprint for teaching psychology as a science to students in all disciplines. He was a formidable Ph.D. supervisor, as I know well from exceptional personal experience. His students, their students, and their students’ students are scattered across the planet inspiring new generation of cognitive and sensory psychologists. His reach was truly international, including a fruitful year at the University of Hertfordshire inspiring UK psychologists.
Applied work, informed by theory, was of paramount importance to him. He worked for FAA, NASA, NSF, U.S. Navy and U.S. Army and received the NASA Distinguished Scientist Award. He applied theoretical psychology to education as a successful entrepreneur. In the 70s he created schools teaching BASIC on early PCs. Latterly, he founded Children’s Progress Inc., subsequently taken over Northwest Evaluation Association where it continues to positively affect children’s achievement, using the US patented Galanter Educational Evaluation Lattice, co-invented with his daughter Michelle
He was one of the greats of American psychology and will be sorely missed by his many friends and colleagues. His work lives on making a positive contribution to the lives of many people who would not even know his name.
He is survived by: his wife Patricia, daughters, Alicia, Gabrielle and Michelle, and eight grandchildren.
The following PDF is Irina Skotnikova’s PowerPoint presented at Quebec, in which you may find useful information regarding to Fechner Day 2016 in Moscow.
Fechner Day 2016 – the 32nd Annual Meeting of the International Society for Psychophysics
First announcement and call for papers
Dear friends and colleagues,
Happy New Year and invitation to visit Moscow in 2016!
We are pleased to send you the 1st announcement on Fechner Day 2016.
The 32nd meeting of the International Society for Psychophysics (ISP) will be held in Moscow, Russia, 15th – 20th of August, 2016.
You are invited to join us in Moscow, capital of Russia, founded in 1147 and full of famous historical and remarkable places, for Fechner Day 2016.
Please bookmark the conference’s website at http:/www.fechnerday.org and visit frequently for updates.
Venue Continue reading »
Craig Leth-Steensen*
Carleton University, Canada
Our very distinguished and long-standing member, Professor William (“Bill”) M. Petrusic has left us. He died on Dec. 12, 2014, at the age of 75. He is survived by his wife Elaine and his three children, Michele, Michael, and Christopher. Bill co-hosted Fechner Day 2012 in Ottawa, Canada, which sadly was his last appearance at the annual ISP conference.
Born in Hazeldell, Saskatchewan, on May 18, 1939, Bill received a BA in psychology from the University of British Columbia in 1961, an MA in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1963, and a PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1968 (where he was supervised by Clyde Coombs). After a stint at the University of British Columbia, he joined the Psychology Department at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada as a professor in 1970 (eventually becoming a Distinguished Researcher and Professor Emeritus in 2004) where he remained until his untimely passing.
Bill’s body of scientific work encompassed (exactly) 50 publications that addressed numerous issues of key importance to psychophysical and psychological researchers. His early published research focussed on the scaling of response time latencies and the study of short-term memory. In the late 70s, Bill published a large number of studies with his student Don Jamieson that dealt with important issues within such areas as duration judgement, preference judgement, and symbolic magnitude judgment (where, hopefully, the major aspect common to all of that work is self-evident). The late 80s and 90s led to a second large body of publications co-authored by another prolific student and eventual close colleague and friend, Joe Baranski. This period yielded seminal work on the semantic congruity effect, memory psychophysics, and the rendering of confidence. Finally, during the last 10 years, Sam Shaki and myself co-authored a number of studies with Bill that served to provide a wealth of novel results pertaining to both the semantic congruity effect and the spatial-numerical association of response codes (or SNARC) effect.
Bill has left behind an enduring legacy, both as a scientist and person, which a great number of the students he has mentored over the years would love to be able to emulate. His dedication to basic scientific work and the development of theory in mathematical terms inspired the people he collaborated with and solidified a place for him in the field as a serious and important researcher. I know that I, along with many others, will dearly miss hashing out research designs and theoretical standpoints with Bill (in addition to numerous discussions surrounding the merits of various 60s-era musical performers).
Keywords: unfolding; stochastic; Dylan; Hays; memory; TOE; reference point; power law; mental rotation; feedback; counting; transitivity; analogue; difference threshold; CVC; cross-over; speed-accuracy; latency-probability; discrete accumulator; slow-and-fast guessing; hard-easy; calibration; context; evidence accrual; comparative instructions; mental number line
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* E-mail: Craig.LethSteensen@carleton.ca
