Biosketch
I have been a psychology major for over 30 years. As with many students, I was drawn to psychology because of my interest in working with and helping people. My initial exposure in course work to personality theory, abnormal psychology, and social psychology met all of my expectations. This was a fascinating field where I could learn about myself and the interesting behaviors of others. I then took my first course in experimental psychology and I was turned off. While the precision of the experimental work appealed to me, some of the areas of research seemed ridiculous. An example of the silly work were the perception studies in which people wore prisms that made the world appear to be tilted. The justification and the meaning of the research escaped me. I was ready to switch majors. Fate intervened, however, and I got a summer job as a research assistant in the psychology department. I wanted to work with a social psychologist but I ended up with an experimental psychologist, Ricardo Morant, whose specialty involved testing the impact of prism wearing. Cruel fate was obviously punishing me.
In the first summer doing research my attitude toward experimental psychology and the study of perception changed entirely. Dr. Morant was a patient teacher who gave me a great deal of freedom to discuss and test my ideas. He turned me loose in the lab and I spent a great deal of time observing the remarkable adaptation of persons to altered visual environments produced by prisms. I learned of the importance of the work for understanding the general principles of human adaptation and the application of the work to the experience of astronauts adapting to altered environments. The hands-on experience of the lab brought to life and made fascinating the same material which had been utterly boring to me in a textbook. I decided to continue as a psychology major.
I worked for three years as an undergraduate research assistant with Dr. Morant. During that time I also worked with Sidney Stecher, who taught me visual psychophysics. With a good background in visual perception, I entered graduate school and learned more about visual information processing from Howard Egeth. Like my previous mentors, he gave me an intellectually stimulating environment where I was encouraged to explore my own ideas.
I believe that experience outside of the classroom is critical for the intellectual growth of a student. One must be able to observe phenomena and test ideas. Furthermore, a student must understand that his/her ideas are as valuable as the teacher's.
Research Interests
The work in the Perception Lab continues to focus on the visual abilities of older adults. With funding from the National Institute on Aging, we have demonstrated that the poor visual information processing performance of elderly adults may be linked to weak sensory signals rather than "cognitive" deficits. Our recent work has been with Alzheimer's disease patients in whom we have demonstrated previously hidden visual deficits in the areas of spatial contrast sensitivity and motion perception. These deficits, which exacerbate the memory problems of the patients, can be remediated in part through image enhancement. Our work now focuses on developing visually fair neuropsychological tests and in developing methods to enhance the visual environments of Alzheimer's patients.
Courses Taught
- PSCL 282 - Quantitative Methods in Psychology
- PSCL 355 - Sensation and Perception
- PSCL 360 - Lab & Seminar in Human Experimental Psychology
- PSCL 369 - Adult Development and Aging
- PSCL 375 - Research Design and Methods
- PSCL 401 - Perception
Recent, Representative Publications
Koss, E. & Gilmore, G.C. (in press). Environmental interventions and functional ability of AD patients. In B. Vellas (Ed.) Research and Practice in Alzheimer's Disease 1998.
Xue, P., Thomas, C.W., Gilmore, G.C., & Wilson, D.L. (1998). An adaptive reference/test paradigm: Application to pulsed flouroscopy perception. Behavior Research Methods, Instuments, & Computers , 30, 332-348.
Stuve, T. A., Friedman, L., Jesberger, J. A., Gilmore, G. C., Strauss, M. E., & Meltzer, H. Y. (1997). The relationship between smooth pursuit performance, motion perception and sustained visual attention in patients with schizophrenia and normal controls. Psychological Medicine , 27, 143-152.
Gilmore, G.C., Thomas, C.W., Klitz, T., Persanyi, M., & Tomsak, R. (1996). Contrast enhancement eliminates letter identification speed deficits in Alzheimers disease. Journal of Clinical Geropsychology , 2, 307-320.
Gilmore, G.C. (1996). Perception. In J. Birren (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Gerontology (pp. 271-279) . San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Gilmore, G.C. (1995). Stimulus encoding in Alzheimer's disease: A multichannel view. In P. Allen and A. Bashore (Eds.), Age differences in word and language processing (pp. 199-219). Elsevier Science B.V.
Gilmore, G.C., & Whitehouse, P. (1995). Contrast sensitivity in Alzheimer's disease: A one year longitudinal analysis. Optometry and Vision Science , 72, 83-91.
Gilmore, G.C., Wenk, H., Naylor, L., & Koss, E. (1994). Motion perception and Alzheimer's disease . Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences , 49, P52-P57. Also digested in Parkinson/Alzheimer Digest, (April, 1995), 26-28.
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