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ABRAMOV, ISRAEL Ph.D.
Professor
His undergraduate studies were at University College, London where he received a law degree (LL.B.) in 1959 and a B.A. (Hons) in Psychology in 1961. His doctoral work was in Psychology at Indiana University under the tutelage of Russel De Valois; he received a Ph.D. in Physiological Psychology in 1967. He then completed a post-doctoral followhsip in Biophysics at The Johns Hopkins University in the laboratory of Edward F. MacNichol. From 1968 to 1973 he was Assistant Professor in the Biophysics Laboratory of Professors H. Kefer Hartline and FloydRatliff at The Rockefeller University. In 1973 he joined the Psychology Department at Brooklyn College where he is currently Professor and Co-Director of the Applied Vision Institute.
Research
For the past forty years Israel Abramov has pursued research into sensory processes, especially in the visual system. The approaches have included physiology (single neuron, massed potentials, anatomy, MRI) and psychophysics, with animals and humans of all ages.
Over the past decade the research has focused mostly on psychophysical approaches but with the aim of understanding the underlying biology. The areas include: color vision, sensory changes across the life span, development of vision in infants, and applied topics such as optimizing the illumination of art objects in museums.
Much of the basic research centers on a battery of visual tests he has designed to measure, with state-of-art precision, a full range of visual capacities. These include: contrast sensitivity across the entire spatio-temporal domain from very low frequencies to the acuity and fusion limits; binocular functions, from binocular fusion to stereopsis measured with dynamic random-dot stereograms that provide estimates of stereoacuity and the extents of Panum's area for both crossed and uncrossed disparities; motion detection; other hyperacuities such as vernier acuity; and color functions, inclduing color screening, Rayleigh anomaloscope matches, photopic and scotopic sensitivities, and hue scaling. Where possible, every participant provides data for all the functions. The very large databases that have resulted allow a novel approach to relating sensory functions to underlying neuronal mechanisms: functions are correlated presumably have common neuronal substrates. Part of the work is also examines chasnges in these functions across the life-span; the large numbers of participants included allows one to tease out even subtle changes; the battery has also been used to examine vision in specific populations, such as participants with Down's syndrome which may represent an accelerated form of aging.
De Valois, R. L., Abramov, I., and Jacobs, G. H. (1966). Analysis of response patterns of LGN cells. Journal of the Optical Society of America, 56, 966-977.
Abramov, I., Gordon, J., Hendrickson, A., Hainline, L., Dobson, M. V., and LaBossiere, E. (1982). The retina of the newborn human infant. Science, 217, 265-267.
Abramov, I., Hainline, L., Turkel, J., Lemerise, E., Smith, H., Gordon, J., and Petry, S. (1984). Rocket?ship psychophysics: assessing visual functioning in young children. Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, 25, 1307-1315.
Abramov, I., Gordon, J., and Chan, H. (1991). Color appearance in the peripheral retina: effects of stimulus size. Journal of the Optical Society of America, A8, 404-414.
Gordon, J., Abramov, I., and Chan, H. (1994). Describing color appearance: hue and saturation scaling. Perception & Psychophysics, 56, 27-41.
Gordon, J., and Abramov, I. (2001). Color vision. Chapter 4, in E. B. Goldstein (Ed.) The Blackwell Handbook of Perception, pp. 92-127. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Scuello, M., Abramov, I., Gordon, J., and Weintraub, S. (2004). Museum lighting: why are some illuminants preferred? Journal of the Optical Society of America, A21, 306-311.
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