Obituary for Dr. Claude Lamontagne, Retired Professor of Psychology at the University of Ottawa

My mentor and honour’s thesis supervisor, Claude Lamontagne, passed away in January.

Claude was professor of psychology at the University of Ottawa. He got his Ph.D. in AI from the the University of Edinburgh in 1976. He was a 3M National Teaching awards recipient, Canada’s most prestitious teaching award.

His obituary is here. Most of the entries are in French. Here follows the obit that I published there, with minor modifications:

In 1988, when I was a Psychology undergraduate at U of O, a few graduate students in a rat lab (in the Lamoureux building where I was a part-time research assistant of George Fouriezos’s) strongly encouraged me to take Claude Lamontagne’s course on Perception. They were sure it would be a good fit for me. They were so right!! I was completely absorbed by that course (which I took in French). I remember debating with Claude lecture after lecture, and my head spinning every week as he refuted my theories, and my understanding developing as a result–it was viscerally and intellectually so much fun! E.g., I would go on long walks with my GF discussing his lectures. That course changed my entire life. Instead of heading for clinical psychology, I would aim for a Ph.D. in cognitive science. I did an honour’s thesis under Claude’s supervision, about his theory of the evolution of vision. (I.e., based on his very original paper: Sensorimotor Emergence: Proposing a Computational “Syntax”). Claude was very generous with his time, giving me an hour a week of supervision, which we often had while walking along the Rideau canal, and allowing me access to his lab which had a Macintosh II. That’s also how I met Mimi.

Claude strongly encouraged me to apply for a Commonwealth Scholarship and study in the UK, preferably with Aaron Sloman. I took Claude up on the idea, got the scholarship and studied with Sloman. Just before I left for England, Claude gave me a copy of Cyrano de Bergerac, in which he inscribed, “Bon Voyages!” Claude of course had the virtuous qualities of Cyrano — so upright (the emblem of Jacques Brel’s call to Vivre Debout, an artist Claude equally loved), so smart, so eloquent, so passionate; but so handsome and jovial. I think giving me that book was a way by which Claude nudged me towards intellectual and moral ideals. Unsurprisingly, Claude figures in the acknowledgments of my ph.d. thesis.

One of the major lessons I learned from Claude was to dare to be a theoretician. (That’s why I didn’t go to McGill and went to the UK). So, my honour’s thesis and Ph.D. thesis, and some of my later work were theoretical. This includes more recent work on the somnolent information processing (SIP) theory which led to “the cognitive shuffle” prediction; which were presented at some conferences, and a paper on that is coming out later this year. My development of the SIP theory and cognitive shuffle technique were inspired by how from his theory of vision Claude predicted a class of visual illusions (illusion of motion including smooth eye pursuit). Claude’s derivation of this prediction was more rigorous than mine — his was demonstrated by his computer simulation.

Claude’s Ph.D. thesis was the most interesting and compelling thesis I’ve read. It should be read by anyone interested in computational psychology or theoretical AI; not just AI of vision but more broadly.

I often visited Claude and Michèle when I visited family in Ottawa. He and Michèle were so generously hospitable. Great food, great company and great conversation.

I’ve just re-read my surviving detailed notes of meetings I had with Claude from 2013 onwards. (Unfortunately, I’ve lost my earlier notes.) There is so much material there I can still learn from!

My notes from a meeting at Mimi and Claude’s house on October 12, 2013 attest to Claude sharing with me some of his insights on art. This helped me launch an edited book project, Discontinuities: Love, Art, Mind (which has been years in the making, mainly on the back-burner, alas). I asked Claude if he would contribute a chapter to the book — i.e., a chapter on his insights about art. Claude generously accepted. He wrote a draft chapter called “Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus — on the Purpose of Art”. When I was nearing the incomplete book’s launch on 9 Dec 2024 (Leanpub allows incomplete books to be published and updated gradually), Claude hadn’t yet finished the chapter. So, I asked him if I could include his chapter in its unfinished form, noting that unfinished-ness is a theme of the book [cf. e.g., Schubert’s Unfinished] and it was already quite valuable. His chapter is so eloquent and insightful! It’s unfinished form is fitting: as such, Claude invites us to think for ourselves how the rest of the chapter should unfold. His chapter will be the penultimate chapter of the book.

And so this note of mine is also unfinished. I will continue to have conversations in my head with Claude, and strive to live up to his standards.