Richard Langton Gregory, (24 July 1923 – 17 May 2010) was a British

psychologist A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and explanation, interpretatio ...

and Professor of

Neuropsychology Neuropsychology is a branch of psychology concerned with how a person's cognition and behavior are related to the brain and the rest of the nervous system. Professionals in this branch of psychology focus on how injuries or illnesses of the brai ...

at the

University of Bristol The University of Bristol is a public university, public research university in Bristol, England. It received its royal charter in 1909, although it can trace its roots to a Merchant Venturers' school founded in 1595 and University College, Br ...

Life and career

Richard Gregory was born in London. He was the son of Christopher Clive Langton Gregory, the first director of the

University of London Observatory UCL Observatory (called the University of London Observatory until 2015) at Mill Hill in London is an astronomical teaching observatory. It is part of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London. History The Observator ...

, and his first wife, Helen Patricia (née Gibson). Gregory served with the

Royal Air Force The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the Air force, air and space force of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. It was formed towards the end of the World War I, First World War on 1 April 1918, on the merger of t ...

's Signals branch during

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

, and after the war earned an RAF scholarship to

Downing College, Cambridge Downing College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge and currently has around 950 students. Founded in 1800, it was the only college to be added to the university between 1596 and 1869, and is often described as the oldest of ...

. He was made an Honorary Fellow of Downing in 1999. In 1967, with Prof.

Donald Michie Donald Michie (; 11 November 1923 – 7 July 2007) was a British researcher in artificial intelligence. During World War II, Michie worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, contributing to the effort to solve " Tunny ...

and Prof.

Christopher Longuet-Higgins Hugh Christopher Longuet-Higgins (11 April 1923 – 27 March 2004) was a British theoretical chemist and cognitive scientist. He was the Professor of Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Cambridge for 13 years until 1967 when he moved to ...

, he founded the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception, a forerunner of the Department of Artificial Intelligence, at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh (, ; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a Public university, public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Founded by the City of Edinburgh Council, town council under th ...

. He was Head of the Bionics Research Laboratory, Professor of Bionics, and Department Chairman 1968–70. Gregory was founding editor of the journal ''

Perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous syste ...

'' (1972), which emphasized phenomenology and novel percepts produced by new stimuli. He was a founding member of the Experimental Psychology Society and served as its president in 1981–1982. He collaborated with

W. E. Hick William Edmund Hick (1 August 1912 – 20 December 1974) was a British psychologist, who was a pioneer in the new sciences of experimental psychology and ergonomics in the mid-20th century. Hick trained as a medical doctor, taking the MB an ...

for the latter's influential paper "On the rate of gain of information". He commented: "I was the only subject for his gain of information experiment to complete the course, as he was the only other subject and he packed it in when the apparatus fell apart." In 1981, he founded The Exploratory, a hands-on science centre in

Bristol Bristol () is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city, unitary authority area and ceremonial county in South West England, the most populous city in the region. Built around the River Avon, Bristol, River Avon, it is bordered by t ...

, the first of its kind in the UK. In 1989, he was appointed Osher Visiting Fellow of the

Exploratorium The Exploratorium is a museum of science museum, science, technology museum, technology, and art museum, arts in San Francisco, California. Founded by physicist and educator Frank Oppenheimer in 1969, the museum was originally located in the ...

, a similar scientific education centre in

San Francisco, California San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

. Gregory has called

Hermann von Helmholtz Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (; ; 31 August 1821 – 8 September 1894; "von" since 1883) was a German physicist and physician who made significant contributions in several scientific fields, particularly hydrodynamic stability. The ...

one of his major inspirations."One on One with Richard Gregory", ''The Psychologist'', vol. 21, no 6, June 2008, p. 568. He appeared on, or was an advisor to, numerous science-related television programmes in the UK and worldwide. His particular interest was in

optical illusions In visual perception, an optical illusion (also called a visual illusion) is an illusion caused by the visual system and characterized by a visual percept that arguably appears to differ from reality. Illusions come in a wide variety; their ca ...

and what these revealed about human perception. He wrote and edited several books, notably ''Eye and Brain'' and ''Mind in Science''. One of his hobbies was punning (making

pun A pun, also known as a paronomasia in the context of linguistics, is a form of word play that exploits multiple meanings of a term, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from t ...

s). In April 1993, he was the guest for

BBC Radio 4 BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC. The station replaced the BBC Home Service on 30 September 1967 and broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes from the BBC's headquarters at Broadcasti ...

's ''

Desert Island Discs ''Desert Island Discs'' is a radio programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It was first broadcast on the BBC Forces Programme on 29 January 1942. Each week a guest, called a " castaway" during the programme, is asked to choose eight audio recordin ...

'', where his favourite choice was Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 30. Having suffered a stroke a few days earlier, he died on 17 May 2010 at the

Bristol Royal Infirmary The Bristol Royal Infirmary (BRI) is a large teaching hospital in the centre of Bristol, England. It has links with the nearby University of Bristol and the Faculty of Health and Social Care at the University of the West of England, also in Brist ...

, surrounded by family and friends.

Lectures

In 1967, he delivered the

Royal Institution Christmas Lectures The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures are a series of lectures on a single topic each, which have been held at the Royal Institution in London each year since 1825. The lectures present scientific subjects to a general audience, including yo ...

on ''The Intelligent Eye''.

Contribution

Gregory's main contribution to the discipline was in the development of

cognitive psychology Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, whi ...

, in particular that of "Perception as hypotheses", an approach which had its origin in the work of

(1821–1894) and his student

Wilhelm Wundt Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (; ; 16 August 1832 – 31 August 1920) was a German physiologist, philosopher, and professor, one of the fathers of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and biology, was t ...

(1832–1920). Between them, the two Germans laid the basis of investigating how the

senses A sense is a biological system used by an organism for sensation, the process of gathering information about the surroundings through the detection of stimuli. Although, in some cultures, five human senses were traditionally identified as su ...

work, especially

sight Visual perception is the ability to detect light and use it to form an image of the surrounding Biophysical environment, environment. Photodetection without image formation is classified as ''light sensing''. In most vertebrates, visual percept ...

and

hearing Hearing, or auditory perception, is the ability to perceive sounds through an organ, such as an ear, by detecting vibrations as periodic changes in the pressure of a surrounding medium. The academic field concerned with hearing is auditory sci ...

. According to Gregory, Helmholtz should take the credit for realising that perception is not just a passive acceptance of

stimuli A stimulus is something that causes a physiological response. It may refer to: *Stimulation **Stimulus (physiology), something external that influences an activity **Stimulus (psychology), a concept in behaviorism and perception *Stimulus (economi ...

, but an active process involving

memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembe ...

and other internal processes.Gregory R. L. (ed.) 1987. ''Oxford Companion to the Mind'': see essay on 'Perception as hypotheses', p. 608. Oxford: OUP. Gregory progressed this idea with a key

analogy Analogy is a comparison or correspondence between two things (or two groups of things) because of a third element that they are considered to share. In logic, it is an inference or an argument from one particular to another particular, as oppose ...

. The process whereby the brain puts together a coherent view of the outside world is analogous to the way in which the sciences build up their picture of the world, by a kind of

hypothetico-deductive The hypothetico-deductive model or method is a proposed description of the scientific method. According to it, scientific inquiry proceeds by formulating a hypothesis in a form that can be falsifiable, using a test on observable data where the ou ...

process. Although this takes place on a quite different time-scale, and inside one head instead of a community, nevertheless, according to Gregory, perception shares many traits with

scientific method The scientific method is an Empirical evidence, empirical method for acquiring knowledge that has been referred to while doing science since at least the 17th century. Historically, it was developed through the centuries from the ancient and ...

. A series of works by Gregory developed this idea in some detail. Kanizsa triangle

Gregory's ideas ran counter to those of the American direct realist psychologist J. J. Gibson, whose 1950 ''The Perception of the Visual World'' was dominant when Gregory was a younger man. Much in Gregory's work can be seen as a reply to Gibson's ideas, and as the incorporation of explicitly

Bayesian Thomas Bayes ( ; c. 1701 – 1761) was an English statistician, philosopher, and Presbyterian minister. Bayesian ( or ) may be either any of a range of concepts and approaches that relate to statistical methods based on Bayes' theorem Bayes ...

concepts into the understanding of how sensory evidence is combined with pre-existing ("prior") beliefs. Gregory argued that optical illusions, such as the

illusory contours Illusory contours or subjective contours are visual illusions that evoke the perception of an edge without a luminance or color change across that edge. Illusory brightness and depth ordering often accompany illusory contours. Friedrich Schumann ...

in the Kanizsa triangle, demonstrated the Bayesian processing of perceptual information by the brain.

Works

*
Recovery from Early Blindness: A Case Study
' (1963), with Jean Wallace. Experimental Psychology Society. Monograph. No.2. Cambridge: Heffers. * ''Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing'' (1966), London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. n twelve languages Second Edition (1972). Third Edition (1977). Fourth Edition (1990). USA: Princeton University Press; (1994) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fifth Edition (1997) Oxford University Press and (1998) Princeton University Press. * ''The Intelligent Eye'' (1970), London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. n 6 languages * ''Illusion in Nature and Art'' (1973), (ed. with Sir

Ernst Gombrich Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich (; ; 30 March 1909 – 3 November 2001) was an Austrian-born art historian who, after settling in England in 1936, became a naturalised British citizen in 1947 and spent most of his working life in the United Ki ...

), London: Duckworth. * ''Concepts and Mechanisms of Perception'' (1974), London: Duckworth. ollected papers * ''Mind in Science: A History of Explanations of Psychology and Physics'' (1981), London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; USA: CUP. Paperback, Peregrine (1984). (Macmillan Scientific Book Club choice). Transl. Italian, ''La Mente nella Scienze'', Mondadori (1985). * ''Odd Perceptions'' ssays(1986), London: Methuen. Paperback (1988) Routledge. (2nd edition 1990–91). * ''Creative Intelligences'' (1987), (ed. with Pauline Marstrand), London: Frances Pinter. . * ''Oxford Companion to the Mind'' (1987), (ed., with Zangwill, O.), Oxford: OUP. ranslated into Italian, French, Spanish. In TSP Softbacks, and other Book Clubs (Paperback 1998). * ''Evolution of the Eye and Visual System'' (1992), (ed. with John R. Cronly-Dillon), vol. 2 of Vision and Visual Dysfunction. London: Macmillan. * ''Even Odder Perceptions'' (1994), ssays London: Routledge. * ''The Artful Eye'' (1995), (ed. with J. Harris, P. Heard and D. Rose). Oxford: OUP * ''Mirrors in Mind'' (1997), Oxford: W. H. Freeman/Spektrum. (1998) Penguin. * ''The Mind Makers'' (1998), London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. * ''Seeing Through Illusions'' (2009), OUP.
Main journal publications
at http://www.richardgregory.org/

Degrees

Honorary degrees

Personal life

In 1953, Gregory married Margaret Hope Pattison Muir, by whom he had a son and a daughter. The marriage was dissolved in 1966. In 1967, he married Freja Mary Balchin, the daughter of writers

Elizabeth Elizabeth or Elisabeth may refer to: People * Elizabeth (given name), a female given name (including people with that name) * Empress Elisabeth (disambiguation), lists various empresses named ''Elisabeth'' or ''Elizabeth'' * Princess Elizabeth ...

and Nigel Balchin. This marriage was also dissolved in 1976. Gregory was survived by two children (Mark and Romilly Gregory), two grandchildren (Luutsche Ozinga and Kiran Rogers), and his long-term companion, Priscilla Heard.

References

External links

* *
Professor Richard Gregory on-line

Richard Gregory – Why I Tell Jokes video and telling his life story at Web of Stories
(video)

The Exploratory in Bristol

Richard Gregory: a life of science and delight
– reflections on his life by Sue Blackmore in

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...

* The

(also known as hollow-mask illusion) in a version usin
Charlie Chaplin's head
has become known to a wide audience. * {{DEFAULTSORT:Gregory, Richard 1923 births 2010 deaths Academics of the University of Bristol Academics of the University of Edinburgh Alumni of Downing College, Cambridge 20th-century British psychologists Commanders of the Order of the British Empire British consciousness researchers and theorists Fellows of Downing College, Cambridge Fellows of the Royal Society Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellows of the SSAISB Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge British cognitive neuroscientists Royal Air Force personnel of World War II Vision scientists