PSYCHOLOGIST BRINGS FAMED LECTURE SERIES TO UCSB

Since their inception in 1909, the Hitchcock Lectures have brought some of the world's most gifted scientific and academic minds to speak at University of California campuses.

Joining the impressive list this year is Stanford University psychology and social science emeritus professor Roger Shepard, who will speak at UC Santa Barbara on Monday and Wednesday.

Shepard -- holder of the United States' highest scientific honor, the National Medal of Science -- will give a lecture titled "Perception, Imagery, and Science" at 2:15 p.m. Monday in Engineering Pavilion II.

In this presentation, Shepard will argue that through natural selection human minds have come to reflect the long-enduring properties of the world.

On Wednesday, Shepard will deliver a talk titled "The Grounds of Science and of Ethics"

at 3:15 p.m. in the University Center Multicultural Theater.

This lecture makes the case that understanding how the mind represents the world can provide a groundwork for both science and ethics.

Both lectures are free of charge and open to the public.

Shepard is internationally recognized for his work in cognitive, mathematical and evolutionary psychology.

He has made influentialcontributions to the understanding of visual and auditory perception, learning, generalization, memory, mental imagery and the relation between evolutionary long-standing properties of the world and the ways in which mental representations have come to reflect them.

He is a graduate of Stanford University and later earned his doctorate at Yale.

He held positions at Bell Labs and Harvard University before returning to Stanford where he has been a faculty member for more than 30 years.

The Hitchcock Lectures were set up by the 1885 bequest of Dr. Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock.

Previous honorees include physicists Robert Millikan, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi and Stephen Hawking; chemist Linus Pauling; and psychologists Wolfgang Kohler, Walter B. Cannon, Torsten Weisel, Eric Kandel and Herbert Simon.

Each year, the honoree gives lectures at UC Berkeley and one other UC campus of his choice.

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