Abstract
John Ross, who died peacefully in Perth on 12th March 2022, was a well known figure in the vision community. Many remember him at ECVP and other conferences for his innovative talks, intelligent and convivial interactions, quick sense of humour and excellent advice for young (and sometimes not-so-young) scientists.
John was born in Ganmain, about 500 km west of Sydney, and studied psychology at the University of Sydney, from where he won a prestigious fellowship to complete a PhD at Princeton. He returned to Australia as a lecturer in psychology at the University of Western Australia, where he rapidly rose the ranks to make professor before turning 40, and remained there for his entire career. He served in many important positions, including Head of Department, Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research, and as consultant to the NH&MRC. He continued in the school of psychology as Emeritus professor until 2018.
The 1970s, when John started his lectureship, were heady times for vision research. Hubel and Wiesel had just published their Nobel prize-winning experiments on the function of the mammalian visual cortex; Fergus Campbell had introduced the powerful Fourier approach; and Bela Julesz at Bell Labs had invented the random-dot stereogram.
John was working far from the prestigious centres of Cambridge, Harvard and Bell Labs – but his research was absolutely avant-garde. He had acquired some disused oscilloscopes and Digital PDP-8 computers from the NASA tracking station in Carnarvon (North-West Australia) after the Apollo space program. With this modest equipment, John had the brilliant insight to program the computer to display one dot at a time to the oscilloscope screen, in random positions, rather than attempting to sweep the screen systematically like a conventional television set (unfeasible at the time). He could make subtle manipulations to the dots, such as introducing binocular disparity for depth, and delays to study temporal dynamics. Not only could these tiny computers (with 16 kilobytes of memory!) generate the random-dot stereograms that required hours of the computer power of Bell Laboratories, they could do so on the fly, to study temporal dynamics. With this technological advantage he was able to make several fundamental contributions.
From my first days as an undergraduate John gave me the freedom and encouragement to work on my own projects; but he was always ready with help and advice, and keen to share the excitement of the research. We worked together for over 40 years, in a most enjoyable collaboration. Perhaps the most exciting times were after his formal retirement, when the Emeritus Professor had the freedom to pursue his passion. With no incentive other than the sheer joy of experimentation, he embarked on a voyage of scientific discovery of the human visual system.
John's research spanned many aspects of perception, including stereopsis, motion perception, and the consequences of eye-movements for perception. All of John's work was original and creative.
Our last adventure, conceived during a sabbatical in Perth in 2007, was to introduce the study of numerosity into mainstream psychophysics: “a visual sense of number”. John had long been fascinated by how we can quickly estimate the number of items, and started an important new line of research to find out, at 77 years of age.
Research in neuroscience was John's passion, but far from his sole interest. He was fascinated by all branches of science, particularly physics and mathematics: and was quite a competent mathematician. He was also extremely fond of and knowledgeable about art, and was himself a talented sketch-artist. He had strong interests in music, literature, film and theatre. He wrote like an angel (and not only on science), and told a riveting after-dinner story. He loved virtually all sports, and excelled at several, particularly tennis.
John is survived by his devoted wife Kerry, his children and grandchildren, who will all miss him dearly. But I am sure we all agree that John was fortunate to enjoy a long, useful, happy and fulfilling life: and can now truly rest in peace.
