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 interpretation of how ...

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 often focus on how injuries or illnesses of t ...

at the

University of Bristol The University of Bristol is a Red brick university, red brick Russell Group research university in Bristol, England. It received its royal charter in 1909, although it can trace its roots to a Society of Merchant Venturers, Merchant Venturers' sc ...

Life and career

Richard Gregory was born in London. He was the son of

Christopher Clive Langton Gregory Christopher Clive Langton Gregory (13 May 1892 – 24 November 1964) was a British astronomer, who established the University of London Observatory. Gregory was born in Parkstone, Dorset and lived in Swanage, Dorset in 1911 and in Hendon, Midd ...

, the first director of the University of London Observatory, and his first wife, Helen Patricia (née Gibson). Gregory served with the

Royal Air Force The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the United Kingdom's air and space force. It was formed towards the end of the First World War on 1 April 1918, becoming the first independent air force in the world, by regrouping the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) an ...

's Signals branch during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

, and after the war earned an RAF scholarship to Downing College, Cambridge. He was made an Honorary Fellow of Downing in 1999. In 1967, with Prof. Donald Michie and Prof.

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

, 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 ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

. 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 system, ...

'' (1972), which emphasized phenomenology and novel percepts produced by new stimuli. He was a founding member of the

Experimental Psychology Society The Experimental Psychology Society (EPS) is an academic society which facilitates research into experimental psychology and communication between experimental psychologists. It is based in the United Kingdom. The society was originally formed a ...

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, ceremonial county and unitary authority in England. Situated on the River Avon, it is bordered by the ceremonial counties of Gloucestershire to the north and Somerset to the south. Bristol is the most populous city i ...

, 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, technology, and arts in San Francisco, California. Characterized as "a mad scientist's penny arcade, a scientific funhouse, and an experimental laboratory all rolled into one", the participatory natur ...

, a similar scientific education centre in

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for "Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

. Gregory has called

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

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 Within 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; thei ...

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 puns). 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 that replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. It broadcasts a wide variety of Talk radio, spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history fro ...

'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 recordings (us ...

'', 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, also known as the BRI, is a large teaching hospital situated 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 Wes ...

, 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, missing 1939–1942 because of the Second World War. The lectures present sci ...

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 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, which ...

, 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, known today as one of the fathers of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and ...

(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 world through the detection of stimuli. (For example, in the human body, the brain which is part of the central nervous system re ...

work, especially

sight Visual perception is the ability to interpret the surrounding environment through photopic vision (daytime vision), color vision, scotopic vision (night vision), and mesopic vision (twilight vision), using light in the visible spectrum refl ...

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 audit ...

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

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. 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 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 characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century (with notable practitioners in previous centuries; see the article hist ...

. 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 James Jerome Gibson (; January 27, 1904 – December 11, 1979) was an American psychologist and is considered to be one of the most important contributors to the field of visual perception. Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system ...

, 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 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 i ...

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, Exp. Soc. Monogr. No.2. Cambridge: Heffers. . * ''Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing'' (1966), London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

n twelve languages N, or n, is the fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''en'' (pronounced ), plural ''ens''. History ...

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 N, or n, is the fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''en'' (pronounced ), plural ''ens''. History ...

* ''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

Family

In 1953, he married Margaret Hope Pattison Muir, one son, one daughter (marriage dissolved 1966). In 1967, he married Freja Mary Balchin, the daughter of writers Elizabeth and

Nigel Balchin Nigel Marlin Balchin (3 December 1908 – 17 May 1970)Peter Rowland, "Balchin, Nigel Marlin (1908–1970)", ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, accessed 9 December 2008 was an English psyc ...

, (marriage dissolved 1976). Gregory is 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 A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide ...

* The Hollow-Face illusion (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