Abstract
On Jan 3rd, 2024, the visual perception community lost a creative scientist and a wonderful friend when Sophie Wuerger died. At the time she was undergoing cancer treatments with courage and optimism. Sophie brought adventure, exuberance, and intensity to everything she did, and we will miss out on a life and scientific career cut short.
Sophie's contributions to understanding visual perception covered many areas. Her work was original and meticulously systematic. In grad school at NYU she did experiments on the role of color and luminance contrast in structure-from-motion (Wuerger & Landy, 1993), but also translated Hans Wallach's seminal paper on perceived direction of motion and perceptual organization (Wuerger et al., 1996). She continued to publish on the role of color in motion perception (Ruppertsberg et al., 2003). While Sophie was in college at Regensburg, Jan Drosler had arranged for her to do an internship on color similarity spaces with Tarow Indow at UC Irvine. During her postdoc at NYU, she decided to test the Euclidean assumption underlying similarity spaces—that equal distances in the space represent equal differences in appearance between colors irrespective of direction or location in the space. Sophie showed that the assumption fails drastically (Wuerger et al., 1995). Understanding the representational space of colors motivated many of her later studies, including her work on constructing a standard spatio-chromatic observer (Wuerger et al., 2002) and her substantial contributions to understanding unique hues, especially the neural basis of their locations in color space and their invariance across the lifespan (Wuerger et al., 2005). Sophie extended issues of color geometry beyond psychophysics and modeling to using fMRI and EEG (Chauhan et al., 2023; Parkes et al., 2009), mentoring many junior colleagues at the Universities of Keele and Liverpool in the process. She was also active in applications of color science, both at an organizational level, and in color computations for novel display technologies and 3D printing. She and her students built an invaluable calibrated database of the spectral characteristics of human skin (Xiao et al., 2017) and used it to build formal models of reconstruction and explore various aspects of socio-cultural perception. Besides her color work, Sophie maintained a long-term research program on audio-visual interactions with her husband Georg Meyer, covering recognition, integration, congruence, semantic interactions, motion extrapolation, learning, and other issues (Meyer et al., 2004, 2005). Recently she had begun exploring whether odors can modulate color appearance (Ward et al., 2023). She had so many ideas and so much energy that there was so much more to anticipate.
Sophie's zest for life lit up people's lives. Several colleagues have remarked how productive it was to discuss science with her, and that she was extraordinarily patient in explaining technical matters and providing thorough and constructive feedback. Others remember being carried on the handlebars of her bicycle on cobbled streets, exploring a new city with her on rollerblades or bicycles, or watching her teach about abstract art to her children Charlotte and Henry. Her students adored her as a mentor. When I invited Sophie to give a talk at ECVP 2023 in the Symposium on Color Geometry, she insisted that her former student Jasna present their recent work. My memories of Sophie from NYC include her being the center of a close group of friends, regularly organizing trips to see Shakespeare in repertory on the Bowery and to listen to chamber music at Barge Music or jazz with the Mingus Big Band. To help me answer questions about Robert Musil, the author of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, she sat with me in front of a microfiche of Musil's 1908 dissertation from Berlin on visual perception and translated the thesis sentence by sentence, while we tried to understand the points he was making. She looked forward to meeting friends from all over the world at conferences, engaging people in earnest discussions with good humor. Her intellectual probing could bring alive a flagging scientific discussion. Vision conferences will not be as much fun without Sophie.
