J. ANthony Movshon

InterViews from The National Academy of Sciences

For over three decades, experimental psychologist J. Anthony Movshon has mapped the mysterious borderland where vision and action intersect. But he almost never made it there. Coming of age in the tumultuous late 1960s made him question whether he should give up on his interests-music and science-and consider doing something more socially relevant. Then he discovered the burgeoning vision research underway at his university, and chose to stay in science. Since then, he has explored how humans take basic input about light and color and use it to understand the world around them. His work has helped reveal how the brain's visual processing develops and works, how that processing translates into perception and action, and what happens when the process goes wrong. Movshon is a professor of neural science and psychology at New York University. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2008.