(Norman) Stuart Sutherland (26 March 1927 – 8 November 1998) was a British psychologist and writer.

Education

Sutherland was educated at

King Edward's School, Birmingham King Edward's School (KES) is an independent day school for boys in the British public school tradition, located in Edgbaston, Birmingham. Founded by King Edward VI in 1552, it is part of the Foundation of the Schools of King Edward VI in Bir ...

, before going to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology. He stayed at

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

for his PhD which was awarded in 1957 for research supervised by

John Zachary Young John Zachary Young FRS (18 March 1907 – 4 July 1997), generally known as "JZ" or "JZY", was an English zoologist and neurophysiologist, described as "one of the most influential biologists of the 20th century". Biography Young went to schoo ...

Career and research

Sutherland held a lecturing post at Oxford from 1960, and was elected a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford in March 1963, before moving the following year to the recently opened

University of Sussex , mottoeng = Be Still and Know , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £14.4 million (2020) , budget = £319.6 million (2019–20) , chancellor = Sanjeev Bhaskar , vice_chancellor = Sasha Roseneil , ...

as the founding

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professors ...

and head of its Laboratory of Experimental Psychology; with the young colleagues he appointed, he rapidly built an international reputation for Sussex in this field. Among psychologists, Sutherland is best known for his theoretical and empirical work in comparative psychology, particularly in relation to visual

pattern recognition Pattern recognition is the automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data. It has applications in statistical data analysis, signal processing, image analysis, information retrieval, bioinformatics, data compression, computer graphics ...

and

discrimination learning Discrimination learning is defined in psychology as the ability to respond differently to different stimuli. This type of learning is used in studies regarding operant and classical conditioning. Operant conditioning involves the modification of a ...

. In the 1950s and 1960s he carried out numerous experiments on rats but also on other species such as octopus; the two-factor theory of discrimination learning that he developed with

Nicholas Mackintosh Nicholas John Seymour Mackintosh, (9 July 1935 – 8 February 2015) was a British experimental psychologist and author, specialising in intelligence, psychometrics and animal learning. Education Mackintosh was born in London, the son of Ian Mac ...

was an important step in the rehabilitation of a cognitive approach to animal learning after the dominance of strict

behaviourism Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual ...

in the first half of the twentieth century. He was also interested in human perception and cognition, and in 1992 he published ''Irrationality: The enemy within'', a lay reader's guide to the psychology of cognitive biases and common failures of human judgement. Among a wider public, Sutherland is most famous for his 1976 autobiography ''Breakdown'', detailing his struggles with

manic depression Bipolar disorder, previously known as manic depression, is a mental disorder characterized by periods of depression and periods of abnormally elevated mood that last from days to weeks each. If the elevated mood is severe or associated with ...

. A second edition of ''Breakdown'' was published in 1995. Stuart Sutherland died from a heart attack in November 1998.

Bibliography

(incomplete; excludes

journal A journal, from the Old French ''journal'' (meaning "daily"), may refer to: *Bullet journal, a method of personal organization *Diary, a record of what happened over the course of a day or other period *Daybook, also known as a general journal, a ...

articles, of which Sutherland published many) *''The methods and findings of experiments on the visual discrimination of shape by animals'', 1961 *''Animal discrimination learning'', 1969 (Edited, with R. M. Gilbert) *''Mechanisms of animal discrimination learning'', 1971 (with

) *''Breakdown'', 1976, second edition published 1995 , reissued by Pinter & Martin 2010, *''Prestel and the user: a survey of psychological and ergonomic research'', 1980. *''The psychology of vision'', 1980 (Edited, with Christopher Longuet-Higgins) *''Discovering the human mind'', 1983. *''Men change too'', 1987Men change too (1987) *''Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology.'' 1990. Also published as ''The International Dictionary of Psychology.'' 2nd ed. New York: Crossroad, 1995. . *''Irrationality''Irrationality (1992), reissued by Pinter & Martin 2007,

References

British psychologists 1927 births 1998 deaths Alumni of Magdalen College, Oxford Critics of parapsychology People with bipolar disorder 20th-century psychologists Fellows of Merton College, Oxford {{UK-psychologist-stub