Remembering Andrei Gorea

It was with great sadness that we learned of the death of Andrei Gorea, on January 7, 2019, at the age of 66. Andre was a great supporter of our journal and served on the editorial board from 2009 until the time of his death. He was also a regular contributor to the journal.

After school in Romania, Andrei moved to Israel in 1971 where he studied psychology as an undergraduate. He subsequently moved to Paris where he received a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and then a master’s and PhD in Experimental Psychology. He obtained a permanent position with the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique at the Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale of Paris V University in 1978.

In 2006, Andrei was instrumental in transferring the lab to the biomedical department of Paris Descartes University at the Centre Universitaire des Saints Pères. He acted as associate director of the new lab, the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception till 2013 and then director until 2018.

Andrei travelled extensively, establishing what were to become long-lasting contacts with well-known scientists. Amongst the people he encountered in these travels were Janus Kulikowski in Manchester, Adriana Fiorentini in Pisa, Christopher Tyler in San Francisco, Patrick Cavanagh in Montréal, Bela Julesz and Thomas Papathomas at Bell Labs, and Dov Sagi at the Weizmann Institute. He organized two successful European Conferences on Visual Perception in Paris, in 1990 and again in 2003. He was the first colleague to organise two European Conference on Visual Perceptions (ECVPs), which showed his dedication to the conference and the importance he attached to face-to-face interaction at conferences. He was a regular attendant and he even made the effort to come to the ECVP 2018 in Trieste, which he knew to be his last one.

Andrei was a skilled psychophysicist and always eager to provide advice and intellectual stimulation in matters of experimental design and fundamental philosophical interest in the psychology of vision. He contributed important papers on the perception of motion and time, awareness and decision, and relations between perception and action. One of his landmark contributions was the demonstration that humans fail to entertain multiple decision criteria simultaneously when stimuli vary in visibility (publication with Dov Sagi in 2000).

Beyond his scientific contribution to the field of perception, Andrei possessed a style and exuded panache like no other scientist in our community. He had strong views and was not afraid to express them, but he also had a gentle and affectionate nature. A true gentleman and, quite simply, for many the sexiest person in vision science. He will be terribly missed.