astronomy

Richard Gregory

Richard Gregory is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Richard Gregory rather than just read about it. In short: Richard Langton Gregory (24 July 1923 – 17 May 2010) was a British psychologist and Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Bristol. Life and career Richard Gregory was born in London.

Key takeaways

Richard Gregory belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Richard Gregory to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Richard Gregory from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Richard Langton Gregory (24 July 1923 – 17 May 2010) was a British psychologist and Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Bristol.

Life and career Richard Gregory was born in London. He was the son of C. C. L. Gregory, the first director of the University of London Observatory, and his first wife, Helen Patricia (née Gibson). Gregory served with the Royal Air Force's Signals branch during World War II, 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, he founded the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception, a forerunner of the Department of Artificial Intelligence, at the University of Edinburgh. He was Head of the Bionics Research Laboratory, Professor of Bionics, and Department Chairman 1968–70. Gregory was founding editor of the journal Perception (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 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, the first of its kind in the UK. In 1989, he was appointed Osher Visiting Fellow of the Exploratorium, a similar scientific education centre in San Francisco, California. Gregory has called Hermann von Helmholtz one of his major inspirations. 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 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's Desert Island Discs, 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, surrounded by family and friends.

Lectures In 1967, he delivered the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on The Intelligent Eye.

Contribution Gregory's main contribution to the discipline was in the development of cognitive psychology, in particular that of "Perception as hypotheses", an approach which had its origin in the work of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) and his student Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920). Between them, the two Germans laid the basis of investigating how the senses work, especially sight and hearing. 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 and other internal processes. 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. A series of works by Gregory developed this idea in some detail.

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 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 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. [in 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. [in 6 languages]. Illusion in Nature and Art (1973), (ed. with Sir Ernst Gombrich), London: Duckworth. Concepts and Mechanisms of Perception (1974), London: Duckworth. [collected 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 [essays] (1986), London: Methuen. Paperback (1988) Routledge. (2nd edition 1990–91). Creative Intelligences (1987), (ed. with Pauline Marstrand), London: Frances Pinter. ISBN 0-86187-673-3. Oxford Companion to the Mind (1987), (ed., with Zangwill, O.), Oxford: OUP. [translated 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), [essays]. 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 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.

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Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Richard Gregory

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Richard Gregory claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Richard Gregory before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Richard Gregory ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Richard Gregory

In research: Richard Gregory appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Richard Gregory in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Richard Gregory is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1923 births, 2010 deaths, 20th-century British psychologists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Richard Gregory outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Richard Gregory in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Richard Gregory means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
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Frequently asked questions

What is Richard Gregory in simple terms?

Richard Langton Gregory (24 July 1923 – 17 May 2010) was a British psychologist and Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Bristol. Life and career Richard Gregory was born in London.

Why does Richard Gregory matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Richard Gregory?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Richard Gregory.