Dear
Auditory list followers.
Last week saw the passing of a dear friend and admired colleague, Mark R
Rosenzweig.
Long before I met him, I knew about him from the classic paper on the
Precedence Effect:
�
Wallach H, Newman EB, Rosenzweig MR. Precedence effect in sound localization.
Am J Psychol 1949;62:315-336
Professsor Rosenzweig was on the Berkeley Faculty in the late
1950s when a new building, Tolman Hall, was built for Psychology. Of great
personal importance for me is that he insisted on including the superb anechoic
chamber that we still use. While Mark began in Berkeley studying the physiology
of sound localization, his work moved steadily into the physiology of learning
and
memory and so, the department advertised, in 1965, an opening for a young
faculty in hearing. To my eternal gratitude, I was at the right time and place
(having recently finished a degree with Lloyd Jeffress), and got hired.
Although
the profound Rosenzweig and Krech research on learning was far removed from
Mark's roots in the Psychoacoustic Lab at Harvard, he was a good friend and
mentor to me, introducing me to interesting people, keeping tabs on
my progress and, most important of all, impressing me with the life-long
pleasure
that a could be derived from this rather wonderful profession. Mark
was a superb lecturer, speaking with clarity and authority on nearly every
aspect of
physiological psychology; indeed, the incredible undergraduate text book that
he,
Arnie Leiman and Marc Breeedlove wrote on the topic continues to be an
encyclopedia
for many of us. He was also a consummate raconteur whose presence in a dinner
party,
whether at his house or yours, made it a delightful experience.
Its been 60 years since 1948 when Lloyd Jeffress published his remarkable Place
Theory for Sound
Localization, a paper still demands interest, admiration and a bit of
controversy.
What a moment in history, with Hebb's publication in 1949 of Organization of
Behavior.
It is in that context that I observe that 1949 also produced a beautiful treatise
on
binaural precedence that began an interest that is still a hot topic.
I
sent this note to the auditory list because Wallach, Newman and Rosenzweig
(1949) is still so
widely quoted in audition. However, if any of you wishes to see where one of
our founders went, scientifically, I suggest that you look at the web site of
the Society of
Neurosciences which has republished a brief autobiography by Mark Rosenzweig.
http://www.sfn.org/skins/main/pdf/history_of_neuroscience/hon_vol_5/c14.pdf
Erv Hafter