Author: Fred Attneave
Fuller name: Frederick Attneave III
Born: March 25, 1919
Died: December 24, 1991
Bio: Fred Attneave was born on March 25, 1919 in Greenwood, Mississippi. He graduated
from the University of Mississippi in 1942 with a double major in Psychology and
English. Attneave was drafted into the army and served as an officer in the Army Signal
Corps for three years in the Pacific theatre working on radio and teletype installations.
After the Army, he entered graduate school at Stanford University and received his Ph.D.
in Psychology in 1949. He returned to Mississippi and spent two years teaching in the
psychology department at the University of Mississippi. Attneave then moved to San
Antonio to do full-time research in the Air Force Personnel Training and Research
Center, an organization that gave him considerable freedom to develop his own ideas.
After one year (1956-1957) as a Fellow at the Center of Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences and one year as a Visiting Associate Professor (1957-1958) at the
University of California at Berkeley he came to the University of Oregon. At Oregon, he
published a series of papers, chapters, and a book on the applications of information
theory to psychology that brought him an international reputation. He established
Oregon as a center for perceptual research. Attneave retired from the psychology
department in 1985. He died at his home on December 24th from complications of
pneumonia at the age of 72