Austin H. Riesen
University of California, Riverside
July 1, 1913 - September 15, 1996
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Scientific Discipline: Psychological and Cognitive Sciences Membership Type:
Emeritus
(elected 1995)
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Austin H. Riesen’s work in sensory deprivation and brain function led to an improved understanding of how brains develop and process information. Intrigued by stories of people who had trouble understanding and recognizing circles and squares after treatment for congenital cataracts gave them sight, he developed experiments in animals examining the results of sight deprivation. Riesen discovered that early sensory experience was crucial for the growth of somatosensory systems. Using a Golgi stain method on his animal subjects, Riesen found that sensory deprivation reduced the proliferation of dendritic neuron branching in sensory areas of the brain, meaning that the lack of visual experience directly correlated with a lack of cerebral development. This was a breakthrough for neuroscience because it demonstrated that motor and mental brain functions weren’t strictly innate, they were also structurally altered by environmental experience (especially vision). Riesen’s innovative studies led to global research on related topics such as the different effects of deprivation and enrichment on early experience, the critical periods of sensory and behavioral development, and the effects of early experience on the central nervous system.
Riesen went to the University of Arizona and received his B.A. degree in psychology in 1935. Four years later, he received his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University. He stayed at the university as an assistant professor and a research associate of psychobiology. Riesen left Yale in 1949 to teach psychology at the University of Chicago where he became a full professor in 1956. In 1962 he accepted a position as a professor of psychology and vice chairman of the department at the University of California, Riverside (UCR). The following year he became the first department chairman of psychology at UCR and held the job until 1968. Riesen was affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Neurology, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology where he was president in 1971.
