Tom Norman Cornsweet (April 29, 1929 – November 11, 2017) was an American experimental psychologist known for his pioneering work in visual perception, especially the effect that bears his name, and in the development of ophthalmic instrumentation.
Academic background and scientific research
Cornsweet is known for documenting the effect that bears his name in the 1960s. Prior to his work on this particular optical illusion, Cornsweet graduated from Cornell University and enrolled in a graduate program at Brown University, operating in the vision research laboratory of Lorrin A. Riggs. During his graduate studies he was co-author of an early paper describing stabilized images. His 1955 Ph.D. dissertation in experimental psychology involved small movements of the eye. Cornsweet was an assistant professor at Yale University from 1955–1959, and then became professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. His interest in psychophysics led him to develop a widely employed improvement in the staircase method. As an outgrowth of the courses he taught, Cornsweet published a frequently-cited textbook.