Emeritus Professor John Ross died peacefully in Montgomery House in Perth on 12 March 2022.
The University of Western Australia passes on its condolences to the Ross family. Professor Simon Farrell, Head of UWA’s School of Psychological Science, said Professor Ross was a long-standing and foundational member of the School, and a genuine world leader in psychophysics research.
Professor of Psychology at the University of Sydney and University of Florence David Burr prepared the following obituary.
"John could be impatient, intolerant and cantankerous. But he was always interesting: quick, intelligent and oozing charisma by the bucket-load. And while he tried hard to conceal it (in fine Australian tradition), was also very affectionate, generous and loyal. "
Professor David Burr
John was born in Ganmain, NSW, and was one of the first students in psychology at the University of Sydney. He won a prestigious fellowship from the Educational Testing Service for post-graduate study at Princeton, where he completed a PhD in psychology, with a thesis on human memory.
He returned to Australia as a lecturer in psychology at The University of Western Australia, in Perth, where he rapidly rose the ranks to make professor before turning 40, and remained at UWA for his entire, very successful, career. He served in many important positions, including Head of Department, Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research, and Chair of the Strategic Planning Committee of the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia. In 1993 he was appointed Emeritus Professor, and continued in the school of psychology on an honorary basis until 2018.
I met the young Professor Ross in first year psychology at UWA in 1972. He made an instant impression. His style was confident and exuberant, his lectures enthusiastic, vibrant and motivating. We were all somewhat intimidated by his intellect and charisma, but I summoned the courage to ask him to supervise my honours thesis: and that small step initiated a lifelong collaboration for which I am deeply grateful.
Image: Professor John Ross at his desk during the 1990's.
The 1970s were heady times for vision research. Hubel and Wiesel at Harvard had just published their Nobel prize-winning experiments on the function of the mammalian visual cortex; Fergus Campbell in Cambridge had introduced the powerful Fourier approach, first to physiological optics then to vision; and Bela Julesz at Bell Labs had invented the seemingly magical random-dot stereogram, which fooled the stereopsis depth system to cause hidden objects to pop out from random noise images.
John was working in the world’s most isolated city – far from the prestigious centres of Cambridge, Harvard and Bell Labs – but his laboratory and research were absolutely avant-guarde. With characteristic entrepreneurial intrigue, he had acquired some disused oscilloscopes and Digital PDP-8 computers from the NASA tracking station in Carnarvon (North-West Australia) after the conclusion of the Apollo spaceship program.
Image: Professor John Ross with his Betagraph in 1975.
With this modest equipment, John had a brilliant insight: he programmed 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, which no computer-driven hardware could do at the time. By programming in machine language, the single dots could be displayed sufficiently quickly to give the impression of many dots at any one time. With this technique he could make subtle manipulations to the dots, such as introducing binocular disparity (differences in position to each eye) to some dots, to create the illusion of depth; and temporal delays to study temporal dynamics.
Not only could he get these tiny computers (with 16 kilobytes of memory!) to generate the random-dot stereograms for which Bela Julesz required the seemingly unlimited computer power of Bell Telephone Laboratories, he could do so on the fly (while Julesz stereograms took hours of computation), and could therefore study temporal dynamics. With this technological advantage he was able to make several fundamental contributions, and was soon recognized by the key players.
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. After I left Perth in 1976, we continued to work together in a very fruitful collaboration, lasting over 40 years. Perhaps the most exciting times were after his formal retirement, when the Emeritus Professor had the freedom from teaching and administrative duties to pursue his passion. With no incentive other than the sheer joy of experimentation, the childlike pride in getting published in Nature and showing off at conferences, he embarked on a voyage of scientific discovery of the human visual system.
John’s scientific career spanned many aspects of psychology and perception: he started in memory, then moved to perception, where he made his most important contributions. He worked on stereopsis (the three-dimensional depth now popular in the movies), on motion perception, and especially on how eye-movements explore the world, and their consequences for perception. All of John’s work was original and creative, never incremental. Much has been published in Nature, the most prestigious of all scientific publications, where he can boast some 10 publications: very few scientists can match that.
Image: Fascinated by all aspects of science, Professor John Ross.
Our last adventure, conceived during a sabbatical in Perth in 2007, was to introduce the study of numerosity – the number of items we perceive – into mainstream psychophysics: “a visual sense of number”. John had long been fascinated by how we can estimate at a glance the number of items, such as those generated by the old PDP-8 computer. This led to solid experimental ideas, going on to found an important new line of research, published in the prestigious journal Current Biology: 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 fine after-dinner story. He loved virtually all sports, and excelled at several, particularly tennis.
It would be inaccurate to say John was an easy person: he could be impatient, intolerant and cantankerous. But he was always interesting: quick, intelligent and oozing charisma by the bucket-load. And while he tried hard to conceal it (in fine Australian tradition), was also very affectionate, generous and loyal.
I cannot overstate how important John was for me: as mentor, collaborator and friend. He is survived by his devoted wife Kerry, his children David and Sue, his stepson Toby, and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We 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.