Michael Kubovy

Michael Kubovy (1940-2025) was an Israeli American psychologist known for his work on the psychology of perception and psychology of art.

His writings and research of visual and auditory perceptual organization helped to rekindle interest in the Gestalt School of Psychology in the late 20th century: a "rebirth" of Gestalt Psychology. This is reflected in a collection he co-edited, Perceptual Organization (1981).

His book The Psychology of Perspective and Renaissance Art (1986) introduced the concept of "the robustness of perspective" and helped to bridge the disciplines of perceptual psychology, art history, and art criticism.

Early life and education

Michael Kubovy grew up in Israel, Czechoslovakia, and Argentina (because his father, Aryeh Leon Kubowitzki, was an Israeli senior diplomat). He served in the IDF and in 1967, when the Six-Day War broke out, while he was a graduate student, he fought with the "Jerusalem Brigade" (composed of Jerusalem residents, including many students and faculty from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) in Tourgeman House at the border crossing between Israel and Jordan known as "Mandelbaum Gate."

He earned his Master's degree under Daniel Kahneman (1968) and his doctoral degree under Amos Tversky (1972), both in psychology and both from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The doctoral dissertation was titled Normative and Informational Aspects of Social Influence (1971).

Career

Kubovy began his academic career at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1971, first as a postdoctoral researcher (advised by Emanuel Donchin) investigating human information processing by means of electroencephalography, and then as Visiting Assistant Professor (1972-1973). He later served as Assistant Professor and Associate Professor at Yale University (1973-1979) and as Associate Professor and Professor at Rutgers University–New Brunswick (1980-1987).

He was appointed Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia in 1987, where he taught and directed a research laboratory in the Area of Cognitive Psychology for nearly 30 years, pursuing questions "in visual and auditory perception, cognition, psychology of visual art and music, the nature of pleasure, the philosophy of mind and the phenomenology of experience," conducting experiments with human observers, analyzing "visual and auditory patterns" and proposing "mathematical/statistical models of the data."

Themes

Decision making

In his early work on statistical decision making, Kubovy studied the role of expected utility in perceptual decision making.