We're Going to Study the Mind!

It all started for me (James) the spring of 1978, when, on the first day of my last required course for my undergraduate degree in psychology, Professor Naomi Weisstein introduced herself to her Sensation and Perception class and said “We’re going to study the mind!” “Really,” I said to myself, “now that sounds interesting”. Over the following weeks I realized I was hooked. This was very cool stuff, real psychological science. I needed to know more. I asked Dr. Weisstein after class how I might get more involved in this mind stuff. She directed me to her lab where her graduate students trained me to be an observer in their ongoing experiments. As it turned out the experiments Amanda and Mary Williams (no relation) trained me to run in were metacontrast masking studies exploring the temporal and configural nature of the object superiority effect. In the beginning I was truly a naïve observer in many ways. I wondered how what I was doing could possibly be of any help to them because I often felt I was simply guessing which of four target lines embedded in a figure I saw on each trial. Later during my first lab meeting, Naomi seemed thrilled with my results as much as I was amazed by them looking so systematic and similar to the other observer’s results. This was my first experience with and introduction to what Naomi later described to me as cognitive psychophysics. Towards the end of that semester I asked Naomi where I might go from here given how fascinated I had become with the study of visual perception. Without a moment’s hesitation she suggested I enroll as a graduate student and work with her at SUNY Buffalo. I was shocked and then so excited for the opportunity. From that first day of class and since, I have felt ever so lucky to have met this wonderful woman. As I have described to her beloved husband Jesse Lemisch, I was blessed to have crossed paths with this amazing woman, this ball of energy that was the “comet Naomi”. Somehow space and time aligned for me to have crossed the tail of the comet Naomi as it streaked across the visual-cognition sky and in doing so my life was changed forever. As we know though, when we see a comet, it is in the process of burning out. That’s why I think of myself as passing through the tail of the “comet Naomi” because soon after starting to work with her she began to suffer from what was later determined to be Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction (CFIDS). Remarkably, as the comet Naomi was slowly physically burning out over so many years, her amazing heart and spirit continued to burn brightly. The beginning of her illness led to lab meetings in her living room while she laid on the couch, to her return to NYC with Jesse, and ultimately to her being bedridden for the next thirty plus years until her death in the spring of 2015. I often wonder where our field of vision science would be today had she remained healthy and been able to spend those years pursuing her study of the mind. It was her energy and enthusiasm for studying the mind that inspired me to study visual perception.