Harry G. Sperling
American psychologist (1924–2023)
Harry George Sperling (August 26, 1924 – July 29, 2023) was an American psychologist. He worked on the visual perception of colour and the physiological basis of colour vision in humans and monkeys. Sperling took a systems approach to understand how colour is processed in the retina. He applied his basic research to characterization of colour blindness and to intense light effects.
Early life and education
Harry George Sperling was born on August 26, 1924. He graduated from the Horace Mann School in 1941. He was awarded a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1944 and an M.A. in Social Psychology from The New School for Social Research in 1946 under the supervision of Solomon Asch. Sperling's Masters research experiment about propaganda (how far can a naive subject's judgment be influenced by a stooge) is described in Asch's 1952 book Social Psychology. He graduated in 1953 with a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Columbia University, under the supervision of Clarence Graham. Sperling's Ph.D. research involved measurements of spectral sensitivity of human subjects and set the stage for his lifelong goal of modeling how the retina processes colour through opponent interactions.
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This entry incorporates text from “Harry G. Sperling” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.