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Dorothea Jameson was born November 16, 1920, in Newton, M.A. Her father was educated in electrical engineering as well as law. Her mother taught her to believe she could achieve whatever she wanted to do. Her early education was in small private schools for girls. She then attended Wellesley College and also attended by her older sister. She began concentrating on psychology but soon became interested in brain mechanisms behind psychological processes. In 1941/2, with the US’s entry in the Second World War, she became involved in a project investigating factors affecting the judgment of distances, a joint project between Wellesley and Harvard. A Harvard researcher in the project was Leo M. Hurvich. After graduation, Jameson became a research assistant at Harvard. In 1948, she married Hurvich. In 1947, Jameson and Hurvich were invited by Ralph M. Evans who was the department head of color control at Kodak to join the company; the main subject of their efforts to be a better understanding of the perception of color that might result in better color photography. In 1957, they moved to New York City, she into a research job at New York University, he as a professor of undergraduate psychology. They remained there until 1962. The next move was to Pennsylvania State University’s Department of Psychology and Institute of Neurological Sciences. Due to prevailing rules at the time, as a woman, she could not be named professor until 1975 when she became a University Professor of Psychology. By that time, she had authored and co-authored (mostly with her husband) some 80 papers, the majority on the subject of color, a number that reached the mid-nineties by the end of her life. During her life, she also showed much interest in color in art, resulting in a number of articles on that subject. As a member of the National Academy of Sciences, she served on several committees and boards of that organization. She was also the recipient of multiple awards, among them the 1987 Helmholtz Award of the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute, the Godlove Award of the Inter-Society Color Council, and the Dean B. Judd Award of the Association Internationale de Couleur. After retirement, she and her husband moved back to New York where she died on April 12, 1998. The close cooperation between her and her husband in research and life is considered exceptional [1, 2].
88.1 Hue Cancellation Experiments
Hue coefficients or relative content of colors of spectral wavelength in terms of four primary hues (unique hues) represented by light of wavelength 475 nm for blue, 500 nm for green, 580 nm for yellow; the stimulus for red complementary to green of 500 nm is a non-spectral purple. At each wavelength, the coefficients of the two primaries involved add up to 1.0. The data are representative of an average observer [4]
Work that she performed independently dealt either with the physiology of vision or with modern art.
At NYU, she operated a fish laboratory in which she and a student developed data demonstrating a degree of color vision in goldfish [5]. Another project involved investigating the activities of retinal cell types that integrate information gained by cone cells. Examples of work related to art are her 1989 article “Color in the hands of the artist and eyes of the beholder” [6] and the joint article with her husband “Contrast to assimilation: in art and in the eye” [7].