I majored in chemistry, physics, mathematics, and biology. Then I did a brief stint in biophysics before discovering physiological psychology and, at last, perceptual and cognitive psychology. I received my Ph.D. from Harvard in 1959 for a thesis on short-term memory. My goal then, as now, was to apply the quantitative and theoretical methods of the hard sciences to the analysis of cognitive processes. My research has dealt with problems in short-term memory, attention, and perception.
Motion perception is a recent example.
In the 1950s, Werner Reichardt, studying insect vision, formulated the first plausible computational theory of motion perception. In the 1980s, Jan van Santen and I were able to modify this theory for human vision, and to show that it made extremely accurate predictions of human performance. The advantage of a computational theory is that one can derive predictions of when it is expected to fail. Charlie Chubb and I used computers to create stimuli that would be completely ambiguous to a Reichardt computation but in which humans easily perceived motion correctly. By testing human observers with computer-generated stimuli, we and others have been able to characterize each of these three motion systems.