I don’t think I ever met Michael, but have long known his Gestalt perception work. I now discover he did so much more, especially as a pioneer in data analysis. He and I would have agreed on many, many things.
This post is courtesy Alex Holcombe, who wrote:
You can browse Michael’s books on perception here, and his dazzling ‘Psychology of Perspective and Renaissance Art‘ here.
During WW2 he fled with his parents from France to Portugal, then eventually Israel, where he completed his university education with cog psy royalty: his master’s with Daniel Kahneman, who initially hired him as a laboratory assistant after a chance encounter at a corner shop, and his doctorate with Amos Tversky, whom he met as his commander in the Israeli reserves.
Among his notable inventions was an auditory analogue to the random-dot stereogram. This allowed a listener to hear a hidden melody with their “third ear” that was entirely undetectable by either ear alone.
Considering data analysis, Michael took delight in the pleasures of taking data seriously. This meant finding a way to visualise and explore data, a key interest of statistician John Tukey. He loved the early software Data Desk, which even allowed you to use sliders to interact with a data visualisation!
Michael lamented reliance on null hypothesis significance testing (NHST), a major cause of the replication crisis. He left, at his death, a sadly unfinished book designed to provide a solution: Use visualisation to evaluate quantitative models. Part of his description:
“We have tools to see if the residuals from the model are normally distributed. And so what we do is we teach the students to use certain tools in a routine way to see if data deviate in any important way from the model that they’re proposing. So we use graphics a lot and we show by example. And because this is a textbook based on R, and there will be R code all over the place, they will have examples of good practice. We’re not going to preach, but we’re going to give examples of what to do. And we hope that by osmosis and by practicing with our examples that we give in the text and on our website, we hope that people will acquire best practices in their data analysis work.”
Vale Michael Kubovy.
Geoff
PS It’s worth reading Alex’s full tribute 🙂