Roger Shepard

Roger Newland Shepard (1929 to 2022) was an American cognitive scientist and the author of the universal law of generalization, which he introduced in 1987. Born in Palo Alto, California, he studied psychology at Stanford, took his Ph.D. at Yale in 1955 under Carl Hovland and did post-doctoral training with George Armitage Miller at Harvard. He then worked at Bell Labs and at Harvard before joining the Stanford faculty, where he became Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor Emeritus of Social Science. He is considered a father of research on spatial relations: he studied mental rotation, in experiments begun in 1968 and first reported in 1971 with Jacqueline Metzler, and he was an inventor of non-metric multidimensional scaling, a method for representing certain kinds of statistical data in a graphical form. The optical illusion called Shepard tables and the auditory illusion called Shepard tones are named after him, and the Cognitive Science Society awarded him its Rumelhart Prize in 2006.