Roger Shepard

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Roger Newland Shepard (born January 30, 1929) is an American cognitive scientist and author of the "universal law of generalization" (1987). He is considered a father of research on spatial relations. He studied mental rotation, and was an inventor of multidimensional scaling, a method for representing certain kinds of statistical data in the plane or in space with minimal distortion, so that it can be apprehended by humans. The optical illusion called Shepard tables and the auditory illusion called Shepard tones are named for him.

Biography[edit]

Shepard was born January 30, 1929 in Palo Alto, California. His father was a professor of materials science at Stanford.[1] As a child and teenager, he enjoyed tinkering with old clockworks, building robots, and making models of regular polyhedra. [2]

He attended Stanford as an undergraduate, eventually majoring in psychology.[2]

Shepard obtained his Ph.D. in psychology at Yale University in 1955 under Carl Hovland, and completed post-doctoral training with George Armitage Miller at Harvard. Subsequent to this, Shepard was at Bell Labs and then a professor at Harvard before joining the faculty at Stanford University. Shepard is Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor Emeritus of Social Science at Stanford University.[3]

His students include Lynn Cooper, Leda Cosmides, Rob Fish, Jennifer Freyd, George Furnas, Carol L. Krumhansl, Daniel Levitin, Michael McBeath and Geoffrey Miller.

Shepard is one of the founders of the Kira Institute.

Recognition[edit]

A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Shepard as the 55th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[4]

Shepard was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1977[5] and to the American Philosophical Society in 1999.[6] In 1995, he received the National Medal of Science.[3] The citation read:[7]

"For his theoretical and experimental work elucidating the human mind's perception of the physical world and why the human mind has evolved to represent objects as it does; and for giving purpose to the field of cognitive science and demonstrating the value of bringing the insights of many scientific disciplines to bear in scientific problem solving."

In 2006, he won the Rumelhart Prize.[3]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Seckel, Al (2004). Masters of Deception: Escher, Dalí & the Artists of Optical Illusion. Sterling Publishing Company. p. 285. Roger Shepard was born in Palo Alto, California. His father, a professor in materials science at Stanford, greatly encouraged and stimulated his son’s interest in science…
  2. ^ a b Shepard, Roger (2004). "How a cognitive psychologist came to seek universal laws" (PDF). Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 11 (1): 1–23. Retrieved February 5, 2019. My investigations of mental transformations had a sudden beginning shortly after I arrived at Stanford. As I was drifting toward wakefulness early in the morning of November 16, 1968, 1 experienced a spontaneous hypnopompic image of three-dimensional objects majestically turning in space. Even before rising from bed, I had mentally worked out the design of the first experiment (Shepard & Metzler, 1971) in what was to becomea long-continuing series…
  3. ^ a b c "2006 Recipient: Roger Shepard". Cognitive Science Society. 2006. Retrieved February 5, 2019. Roger N. Shepard is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is the William James Fellow of the American Psychological Association. In 1977 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 1995 he received United States’ highest scientific award, the National Medal of Science.
  4. ^ Haggbloom, Steven J.; Warnick, Jason E.; Jones, Vinessa K.; Yarbrough, Gary L.; Russell, Tenea M.; Borecky, Chris M.; McGahhey, Reagan; et al. (2002). "The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century". Review of General Psychology. 6 (2): 139–152. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.6.2.139.CS1 maint: Explicit use of et al. (link)
  5. ^ "Roger N Shepard". National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved February 5, 2019. Election Year: 1977
  6. ^ "American Philosophical Society Member History". American Philosophical Society. Retrieved February 5, 2019. He is the recipient of the James McKeen Cattell Fund Award, the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the Award in the Behavioral Sciences from the New York Academy of Sciences, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology from the American Psychological Foundation, the Wilbur Lucius Cross medal of the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association, the Rumelhart Prize in Cognitive Science, and the National Medal of Science. He has also received honorary degrees from Harvard, Rutgers, and the University of Arizona.
  7. ^ "The President's National Medal of Science: Recipient Details Roger N. Shepard". National Science Foundation. 2005. Retrieved February 5, 2019. For his theoretical and experimental work elucidating the human mind's perception of the physical world and why the human mind has evolved to represent objects as it does; and for giving purpose to the field of cognitive science and demonstrating the value of bringing the insights of many scientific disciplines to bear in scientific problem solving.

External links[edit]


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