Dorothea Jameson: A memoir

✍ Scribed by David H. Krantz

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 73 KB
• Volume: 23
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0361-2317
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1520-6378(199812)23:6<358::aid-col3>3.0.co;2-s

✦ Synopsis

Dorothea Jameson died unexpectedly on April 12, 1998, from a previously undiagnosed lung cancer. Her death brought to a sudden close a long career of devotion and notable contributions to vision research.

Many readers of CR&A already know that Dottie Jameson and Leo Hurvich developed Ewald Hering's opponentcolors theory into a rigorous, quantitative account of a wide variety of color phenomena. A less-known fact, and one that I find fascinating from the standpoint of relations between basic and applied research, is that Jameson and Hurvich first began, in 1947, to focus their research on color perception, only because Ralph Evans, then head of the Color Control Division at Eastman Kodak, recognized that understanding color-both in the 3-dimensional world and in photographs-depends crucially on understanding perceptual processes. There were already some psychologists at Kodak, but early in his expansion of the Color Control Division, Evans recruited three additional psychologists working on visual perception-Jameson, Hurvich, and the then senior member of the triad, Alfred Holway-from the Research Division of the Harvard School of Business Administration. Their mandate was to study color perception; within that area, they were free to pursue their interests in whatever directions seemed important to them. Evans' own interests and unsolved perceptual problems were beautifully demonstrated in the color plates of his 1948 book. 1 In particular, his demonstration of the subtle transition between color contrast and color spreading or assimilation (see p. 181, and plate XI) set color researchers a problem that deeply fascinated Dottie. This was a problem that could not have been solved in the 1940s, but eventually, she and Leo made notable progress toward a solution. 2,3 Whatever the fortunate chance that brought Dottie Jameson to color research, her destiny in science was a product of early development rather than luck. Dottie was born in Newton, Massachusetts, on November 16, 1920, the third of five children. The following two quotations, from an autobiographical memoir 4 (written in third person) show her own perception of early influences:

Although her father was trained both in electrical engineering and law, it was her mother who taught her to