Over a very long career, my work ranged from applied problems (such as designing and evaluating flight instruments and the role of vision in midair collisions of aircraft) to a wide range of basic problems in perception. My earliest papers in perception dealt with the moon illusion, i.e., why the moon over the horizon may appear to be much larger than the elevated moon, even though the size of the image of the moon in the eye is the same regardless of its elevation. Despite the passage of many years, my interest in this problem persists. I am currently writing a new paper on the moon illusion, and several recent papers are linked to this web page. I also published extensively on stereoscopic depth perception and binocular rivalry, and even now I am finishing a new paper on these subjects. I spent more than 20 years working on the electrical activity of the human brain and its magnetic field. Based on measures of changes in the brain’s field elicited by acoustic stimuli, my colleagues and I succeeded in determining the basic tonotopic organization of the human auditory cortex. This finding was confirmed about 20 years later using positron emission tomography. While I retain an interest in this general area, I am no longer actively engaged in research. However, I am still working on the perception of size and distance to objects, and the depth between them, at both near and very long distances.
Ph.D. Psychology, New School University, 1961
Senior Research Scientist, Long Island University, C.W.Post Campus. Brookville, NY. (1995 - present).
Note: follow link to cv (above) for complete professional biography.
The Moon Illusion I, L. Kaufman & I. Rock, Science, 1962, 136, 953-61.
Perceptual distance and the moon illusion. Kaufman, L., Vassiliades, V., Noble, R. & Kaufman, J. H. Spatial Vision, 2007 (20) 155 – 175, in.
Perceptual distance and the constancy of size and stereoscopic depth. Kaufman, L., Kaufman, J. H., Noble, R. Edlund, E., Bai, S. & King, T. Spatial Vision, 2006 (19) 439 – 457.
Explaining the Moon Illusion. L. Kaufman & J.H. Kaufman. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2000, (97) 500- 505.