Reflections on the early history of Perception & Psychophysics

Abstract

Perception & Psychophysics was founded in 1966 by Clifford T. Morgan. After World War II (WWII) Cliff had received a faculty appointment at the Johns Hopkins University to build a psychology department. He quickly put together an outstanding faculty, nearly all of whom were or soon became prominent in their fields. But Cliff was a complex person who was always searching for the life that would satisfy him. He resigned from Hopkins in 1954 and moved to some acreage on the Choptank River on the Maryland eastern shore. There he spent his time on the Introduction to Psychology that he had written in collaboration with some of the members of the Johns Hopkins psychology department. (He had already authored the highly successful textbook Physiological Psychology as well as several other books, and the royalties from these gave him independence from a university appointment.) At the time that Cliff founded Perception & Psychophysics (PP otherwise, I would get the reputation for doing trivial and superficial research. It must be remembered, though, that Hilgard said this at a time when money for research had been quite scarce. It was not until the early 1950s that research grants in the behavioral and social sciences became available from NSF and NIMH. Although Cliff Morgan himself was no longer active in research, he was acutely aware of the publication bottleneck for experimental psychologists. The number of psychologists had mushroomed after the war. With research grants from NSF and NIMH, laboratories had been established and data were flowing forth. …