Irvin Rock

Irvin Rock (1922–1995) was an American experimental psychologist who studied visual perception at the University of California at Berkeley. He wrote a book, titled The Logic of Perception, and was regarded as an excellent perception psychologist. Rock is notable in the field of psychology for his 1957 experiment where he tilted a square to make it look like a diamond and then tilted his test subjects and asked them what shape they saw. The experiment tested Rock's hypothesis that perceptual phenomena could be explained by higher-level mental processes instead of merely by automatic processes. When his test subjects continued to perceive the shape as a diamond after being tilted to view the shape as a square, Rock concluded that perception is an intelligent, higher-level mental process.[1] This differed from previous conclusions by Gestalt psychologists that perception was not a higher-level process.[2] Rock later wrote another important book on the field of inattentional blindness.

  1. ^ Rock, Irvin (June 1957). "The Role of Repetition in Associative Learning". The American Journal of Psychology. 70 (2). University of Illinois Press: 186–193. doi:10.2307/1419320. JSTOR 1419320. PMID 13424758.
  2. ^ Hunt, Morton (2007). The Story of Psychology. Anchor Books. p. 549.