After a year of post-doctoral research at the Naval Research Laboratory and two years as a research associate at Harvard University, he became a member of the technical staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he stayed until 1966. From Bell Labs Shepard joined the faculty at Harvard as a full professor. Two years later he moved to Stanford, where he subsequently was named the Ray Lyman Wilbur professor of social science. This understanding will allow us to organize control rooms, cockpit displays and even educational programs to be compatible with the way we think. In his doctoral dissertation at Yale, Shepard tackled a fundamental problem in human and animal learning called generalization.
Generalization is the process of responding to a new situation based on past experience.
As animals and humans go through life, it is highly unlikely that they will ever encounter the same total sensory input twice. So the ability to generalize keeps organisms from being hopelessly confused by the welter of sensory stimuli that they are continually receiving. The mind can do this only by assessing the similarity of each new sensory pattern to previous sensory patterns. While working at Bell Labs, Shepard showed that it was possible to find objective measures of the similarity between types of stimuli, such as different colors. Previously, observers assessed such similarities subjectively.