Hans Wallach
Swarthmore College
November 28, 1904 - February 5, 1998
|
Scientific Discipline: Psychological and Cognitive Sciences Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1986)
|
Hans Wallach was an experimental psychologist whose pioneering work on auditory space perception and stereophonic sound helped explain the development of vision and hearing. He discovered the basic psychological principle that made stereophonic reproduction (an auditory method that gives the impression of directionality and audible perspective) possible. Wallach developed the use of perceptual adaptation and relearning as an instrument to provide separable channels or cue systems of information about space and movement. He also provided irrefutable evidence that supported the theory on the extraction of spatial structure from the transformations provided by relative motion between the viewer and 3-D arrangements. His contributions to the areas of counteradaptation or perceptual relearning, overlapping cue systems, and motion perceptions were important for modern perceptual psychology.
Wallach attended the University of Berlin and received his PhD in 1934. From 1936 to 1942, he worked as a research associate at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. He left his research to pursue a career as an educator at the college in 1944, and he accepted a position as a full professor of psychology in 1953. He served as chairman of the college’s Department of Psychology from 1957 to 1966. Wallach remained on the faculty until 1975 when he left his professorship to once again become a research psychologist at the institution. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1954 to 1955 and of the Society for Experimental Psychology in 1982. For his achievements, Wallach received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association in 1983.
