Not a textbook case
Dorothea Jameson: Vision and perception pioneer
This week, in honor of Brain Awareness Week, Neurocracy will profile trailblazing and influential scientists who are often overlooked in neuroscience history.
Born in Massachusetts in 1920, Dorothea Jameson was encouraged by her parents from a young age to take a hands-on approach to overcoming obstacles. Her mother in particular worked to instill her daughter with industrious skills, despite such skills being deemed “unfeminine.” She would find the rest of the world far less accommodating than her family and early educators. In her autobiography, she recounted how, as a student preparing to take her College Board exam, a male student quietly informed her: “You’re in the wrong room, this is chemistry.”
Jameson studied psychology at Wellesley College, graduating in 1942. While still an undergraduate, she began working at Harvard as a research assistant, where she studied distance perception and worked to improve the precision of rangefinders for World War II weapons. While at Harvard, she met her future husband and frequent collaborator, Leo M. Hurvich, with whom she carried out many of her groundbreaking studies. After graduating from Wellesley, Jameson continued studying visual perception at Harvard until 1947, when she and Huvirch began working at Eastman Kodak Company.
In 1957, Jameson and Hurvich collected crucial evidence to support the opponent process color theory, first proposed in 1892 by German physiologist Ewald Hering. The theory posits that in humans, color is interpreted by receptors in the visual system by processing color signals in opposition. Simply put, red and green are “opponent colors”, as are blue and yellow, and black and white; when one color is observed, it enhances the opponent processes in the receptors, which intensifies the opposing color in a negative after-image. This phenomena is best demonstrated in the image to the left. Staring at the red dot in the center of the flag for 30 seconds, then looking at a blank white space will result in a red, white, and blue after-image. Jameson and Hurvich tested the theory using hue cancellation experiments that measure the amount of color required to eliminate its opponent color. Their findings helped explain how the human eye and visual system discriminate and process colors.
In 1972, Jameson was appointed to full professorship at University of Pennsylvania, where she continued her research in color perception, function of retinal cells in size and color perception, and physiology of the visual system. A lifelong lover of art and art history, Jameson also studied the visual interpretation of composition and visual elements in artwork.
For her groundbreaking work in vision and color perception, Jameson received many awards and honors, among them the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Hermann von Helmhotz Award of the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute, and an honorary Doctor of Science degree from The State University of New York in 1989. Jameson died from lung cancer in 1998 at age 77. Her legacy is one of hard work, perseverance, and an endless passion for understanding the unknown.
—A.I.
