Stephen Palmer

Steve Palmer, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley died on July 29, 2023, after an extended battle with a rare neurological disorder, multiple systems atrophy. He was a vibrant member of the Department of Psychology for 44 years and had a profound influence on the department, university, and field of cognitive psychology. Steve was a founding member of the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences (originally the Institute of Cognitive Studies), serving as director from 1990-2000. During that time, he spearheaded an initiative that led to creation of the undergraduate Cognitive Science program. His accolades include election as a fellow in the Association for Psychological Science and the Society of Experimental Psychologists.

Steve was born and raised in New Jersey, and stayed local for college, graduating from Princeton University in 1970. Foreshadowing his extraordinary experimental skills, Steve received the Howard Crosby Warren Prize, awarded to the outstanding psychology major, in both his junior and senior years, a feat that remains unmatched. He attended graduate school at UC, San Diego, working under the supervision of Dave Rumelhart and Don Norman, two leading figures in the cognitive revolution that was in full bloom during the 1970’s. His interest in perceptual organization emerged during that time, a theme that was to remain central to his research program throughout his career.

Steve joined the Department of Psychology at UC, Berkeley in 1975, was promoted to Professor in 1984, and transitioned to a Professor of the Graduate School in 2009. He was truly one of the 20^th Century giants in the fields of perception and cognition, recognized as the flag bearer of the modern era of Gestalt psychologists with his focus on understanding the principles that underlie our phenomenological visual experience. 

Steve made groundbreaking contributions to fundamental problems in cognitive representation and perceptual organization. His 1977 paper titled, “Hierarchical structure in Perceptual Representation” remains a classic, providing a formal theory of how objects are efficiently coded in a hierarchical scheme, a representation that brings to the forefront critical, invariant features. Steve extended these ideas over the years to explain a broad range of core perceptual phenomena essential for shape constancy, motion perception, figural goodness, and contextual effects. He identified novel principles of perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization such as common region, edge-region grouping, element connectedness, and uniform connectedness. A key thread of Steve’s work concerned the relationship between perceptual organization and other stages of object recognition. In a series of studies, he challenged classic ideas and showed that many grouping phenomena occur relatively late in processing, and indeed, may undergo revision during the perceptual process. Indeed, this work was also emblematic of Steve’s willingness to revise his own thinking as the data demanded; he had published influential papers earlier in his career arguing for a more fixed processing order.

In the latter phase of his career, Steve took up the study of aesthetics. Here he sought to understand general principles of aesthetics as well as individual and cultural differences. In the spatial domain, he sought to understand people’s preferences for the spatial layout of compositions, such as those found in paintings or photographs. He found that these preferences are governed by several kinds of biases. For example, they typically prefer a horse to be depicted as facing inward in a portrait, but this preference can change to match the context. If the image is meant to convey a front runner, people will prefer the horse to be shifted off to the side with its head facing the close edge as if it is running out of the frame. Steve referred to such context effects as representational fit, referring to the goodness-of fit between the visual input and the semantic context of the scene. 

In the color domain, Steve put forth what has come to be recognized as a leading theory of color preferences, the ecological valence theory (EVT). The core idea is that color preferences are based on how much people like concepts associated with those colors. Blue tends to be liked because we associate it with clear skies and clean water; dark yellows are disliked given their association with rotting food and biological waste. (And Cal grads prefer blue-and-gold whereas Stanford grads red-and-white.) While the EVT had its roots in correlational studies, casual evidence came from work showing that color preferences could be systematically manipulated by priming individuals to think about positive/negative objects associated with specific colors. Steve’s work on these problems was instrumental in bringing psychophysical and neuroscience methods to the study of aesthetics, a field that came to the forefront with his book, co-edited with his colleague Art Shimamura, Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience.

While laying foundations for aesthetic science, Steve also developed an interest in cross-modal perception. He sought to understand how people mapped perceptual features between modalities. For example, why do people associate one type of music to one set of colors and another type of music to a different set of colors. Here he catalogued systematic mappings such as the association of major scales being associated with bright, saturated colors and then proposed the emotional mediation hypothesis, the idea that these matches reflect shared emotional associations between colors and music. For example, the happiness of music was strongly correlated with the happiness of colors selected to go with the music. In a creative series of experiments, Steve found support for this hypothesis across a wide variety of stimuli, including musical genres, human faces, and visual textures. 

Steve’s theoretical and empirical contributions are many, but his most lasting mark on the field arises from his extraordinary ability to see, as the Gestalt psychologists would say, both the forest and trees. Steve was a big picture scientist, someone who was comfortable listening to talks in linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, computer science, art, etc. and appreciate the unique perspectives and approaches that emerge from these diverse fields. Members of our Berkeley community, as well as conference audiences were always primed to listen when Steve spoke during the Q&A, anticipating that he would place the work in a broad context with his probing questions and synthetic comments. These intellectual skills are most evident in his foundational book, Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology. Ten years in the making, this book has been the essential primer in the field since its publication in 1999. 

Steve was an outstanding teacher and mentor. With the Institute of Cognitive Studies thriving in its mission to promote interdisciplinary research and graduate training, he led the effort to create an undergraduate program in cognitive science at Berkeley, one that in just a few years was bursting at the seams with over 300 majors. His Perception class was legendary, with the students’ reaction best summarized in one end-of-term evaluation, “Palmer rocks! Please give him a raise and bonus.”   He opted to sit at a desk in his subterranean lab in Tolman Hall, foregoing a windowed 3^rd floor office, so that he could be close to the action. He made his students feel like anything they had to tell him was important. He encouraged the lab members to share works in progress—what were referred to as “drafty drafty drafts”—and would do the same in return, providing deep insight into his creative processes. And with his many hobbies and passions, he demonstrated by example the importance of maintaining a balanced life.

Despite Steve’s stellar scientific accomplishments, he was kind, humble, and caring. One of his favorite things to do at the Vision Sciences Society (VSS) meeting was to visit student posters, learn about their work, and discuss ideas on future directions for their research. Steve noticed that once the students saw his name on his name tag, they would freeze up out of intimidation. Many famous scholars would be proud for people to know their name, but Steve had the opposite reaction. He would use his program to shield the name tag, settling in for a relaxed, creative conversation.

Steve practiced what he preached, nurturing the artist within in the second half of his life. His photographs grace the hallway of Psychology’s space within Berkeley Way West. After moving to New Mexico post-retirement, Steve turned to a creative form of painting, pouring acrylics on plexiglass to make dazzling kaleidoscopic works that filled the home he shared with his husband, Avi Kriechman in the hill country north of Albuquerque.

In addition to Avi, Steve is survived by his two children, Nathan and Emily, his grandson Calloway, and brother Rob and sister-in-law Sharon.

Steve was a wonderful scientist and colleague, a man with a passion for all seasons.

Rich Ivry, Karen Schloss, Joe Brooks, Bill Prinzmetal, and Daniel Levitin