Joseph Jastrow

Joseph Jastrow

Joseph Jastrow (January 30, 1863 – January 8, 1944) was an American psychologist, noted for inventions in experimental psychology, design of experiments, and psycho-physics. Jastrow was one of the first scientists to study the evolution of language, publishing an article on the topic in 1886. He also worked on the phenomena of optical illusions, and a number of well-known optical illusions (such as the Jastrow illusion) were either discovered or popularized in his work.

Schooling and appointments

Jastrow was born in Warsaw, Poland. A son of Talmud scholar Marcus Jastrow, Joseph Jastrow was the younger brother of the Orientalist, Morris Jastrow, Jr.. Joseph Jastrow came to Philadelphia in 1866 and graduated at Penn in 1882. Jastrow was a fellow in psychology at Johns Hopkins (1885–86), during which time he assisted C. S. Peirce with experiments in psycho-physics that introduced randomization and blinding for a repeated measures design. From 1888 onwards, Jastrow was a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Professor Jastrow was head of the psychological section of the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. He served as president of the American Psychological Association for the year 1900. He contributed to Science, the Psychological Review, and to other periodicals.

His wife was Rachel Szold, a sister of Henrietta Szold.

Publications

Jastrow's duck-rabbit illusion.

His publications include:

• Charles Sanders Peirce and Joseph Jastrow (1885). "On Small Differences in Sensation". Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences 3: 73–83. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Peirce/small-diffs.htm.  http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Peirce/small-diffs.htm
• Time Relations of Mental Phenomena (1890)
• Epitomes of Three Sciences (1890)
• Fact and Fable in Psychology (1900)
• The Subconscious (1906)
• The Qualities of Men (1910)
• Character and Temperament (1914)
• "Charles Peirce as a Teacher" in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, v. 13, n. 26, December, 723–726 (1916). Google Books and text-string search.
• The Psychology of Conviction (1918)
• The House that Freud Built (1932)
• Wish and Wisdom: Episodes in the Vagaries of Belief (1935)
• Story of Human Error (1936)

External links

• Rabbit-Duck Illusion
• Duck-rabbit and Rabbit-duck (after Wittgenstein)
• Mind Tricks for the Masses, On Wisconsin magazine article
• Joseph Jastrow's biography at University of Wisconsin - Madison's Psychology Department