Harry G. Sperling
American psychologist (1924–2023)
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Through Visual perception and Operant conditioning
Early life and education
Harry George Sperling was born on August 26, 1924. He graduated from the Horace Mann School in 1941. He was awarded a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1944 and an M.A. in Social Psychology from The New School for Social Research in 1946 under the supervision of Solomon Asch. Sperling's Masters research experiment about propaganda (how far can a naive subject's judgment be influenced by a stooge) is described in Asch's 1952 book Social Psychology. He graduated in 1953 with a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Columbia University, under the supervision of Clarence Graham. Sperling's Ph.D. research involved measurements of spectral sensitivity of human subjects and set the stage for his lifelong goal of modeling how the retina processes colour through opponent interactions.
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Career
Sperling was hired by the Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory in New London, Connecticut. During his tenure there from 1948 to 1959, he worked with Commander Dean Farnsworth detecting and classifying the characteristics of different types of colour blindness. Sperling was given leave to fulfill his Ph.D. requirements at Columbia University during this period.
Sperling worked in St Paul Minnesota for Honeywell Inc. 1959–1966. He developed experimental protocols to obtain threshold spectral sensitivity data from rhesus monkeys using operant conditioning techniques, finding strong similarity with data from humans.
In 1967, Sperling was appointed professor at the University of Texas Medical Center in Houston, where he remained until retirement in 1995. In Houston, he acquired data to pursue the model of opponent interactions that can explain primate spectral sensitivity. He investigated intense light effects on rhesus monkeys that involved experimental color-blinding, spectral sensitivity measurements and ultrastructure of the retina. With graduate student Robert E. Marc, he pioneered chromatic mapping of retinal photoreceptors (retinal cones) using a vital stain. Combining spectral sensitivity data with electroretinography that measures electrical activity of different retinal cell types, he was by the end of his career convinced that all colour processing is completed in the retina.
Death
Harry G. Sperling died in Northbrook, Illinois on July 29, 2023, at the age of 98.