Ancient History

I grew up in a tiny town in southern Vermont, in an area accurately described by our
summer swim directors as “the kind of place you’d want to raise your kids – even though
they’ll hate you for it!” The Green Mountains of Vermont are indeed beautiful, but the
opportunities for intellectual growth and stimulation (in the pre-Internet era!) were
sparse. I was lucky, though, to have a number of truly wonderful teachers. Our town
wasn’t big enough to have its own high school, so I rode the bus daily to the neighboring
town, twenty miles away, where students from nine towns pooled together to form my
graduating class of 63 students.

Undergraduate - MIT
I had lots of fun as an undergraduate at MIT, where I discovered that in reality there were
LOTS of people who were driven by curious and a zest for learning. My freshman year I
revelled in exploring all sorts of topics I had never been exposed to, and made full use of
MIT’s policy of not requiring a declaration of major until sophomore year. In addition to
a “hobby” of signing up for twice as many classes as anyone could handle, and then
pruning them down as the semester went on, I also learned to sail on the Charles River
[photo] at the MIT Sailing Pavilion,joined the local chapter of service fraternity Alpha
Phi Omega, was on the production staff for the student newspaper The Tech, and helped
show films and bring interesting speakers to campus through the Lecture Series
Committee.

I eventually chose the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, studying visual
perception. My first research experience was to assist Shin Shimojo, then a graduate
student in Richard Held’s Infant Vision Lab, on experiments exploring the development
of stereo vision in human infants. That is, how babies learn to use their two eyes together
to see in depth. [photo] Our experiments showed that this ability develops around four
months of age, on average. This corresponds to the age at which reaching behavior
usually develops!

I then moved to Jeremy Wolfe’s lab, where I worked for the remainder of my time at
MIT. I was extraordinarily lucky to have him as both my academic advisor and my
research supervisor. I worked on projects involving long-term tilt aftereffects [link to:
Wolfe, J.M. and O'Connell, K.M. (1986) Fatigue and Structural Change: Two Consequences of Visual Pattern Adaptation. Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, 27, 538-543.],nomalous binocular vision, binocular rivalry, and adaptation of the resting states of visual accommodation [link to: Wolfe, J.M. and O'Connell, K.M. (1987) Adaptation of accommodation: Light and dark field measures. Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science,28, 992-996.
I graduated from MIT on a very hot June day in 1987 [photo]. All undergraduate and
graduate students are called by name, one at a time, to receive their diplomas, in
alphabetical order by School, then Department, then Name. It was not until that day that
I had a brief glimmer of doubt about my choice of major – our department was in the
Whitaker College, and the nine of us were at the very end of the procession! That was
the first year an undergraduate degree was offered in Brain and Cognitive Psychology,
which had just transformed from being the graduate-only Psychology Department.

Graduate School - Berkeley
For graduate study I chose to work with Anne Treisman, in the Psychology
Department at the University of California, Berkeley. In a wonderful lab co-supervised
by Nobel Prize winner Danny Kahneman, I had a wonderful collection of graduate
students as colleagues. We had many lively discussions on topics ranging from the role
of space for attentional “binding” of features, to octopus-designs for negative priming
experiments, to counterfactuals (thinking about things that aren’t). A blackboard in the
lab was used for scribbling ideas and data and stimulus designs on – but we always saved
a corner of it for “lab quotes”, funny things people said taken wildly out of context. A
sampling can be seen here