New York Times' Best Seller Author to Speak at Fechner Day

New York Times’ Best Seller Author to Speak at UMSL| Optometry Fechner Day

The University of Missouri-St. Louis College of Optometry’s 13^th Annual Fechner Day will be held on Friday, October 24, 2014 at 12:30pm in Lucas Hall Room 100.   Fechner Day is celebrated at many academic institutions including an annual international conference.  The tradition has continued at UMSL thanks to the generous support of Dean Davis.  

The College of Optometry pays tribute to Gustav Fechner (1801-1887), a German experimental psychologist, who founded psychophysics and formulated Fechner’s Law, a landmark in the emergence of psychology as an experimental science. Fechner believed that one can better understand the brain by measuring the relationship between a stimulus and behavior. He developed a variety of methods and statistical techniques to measure behavior.  Today when optometrists measure many aspects of vision including a  patient’s visual acuity, they are using one of Fechner’s methods.

This year’s guest speaker will be Dr. Alexandra Horowitz, a New York Times’ Best Seller Author who has written several books and additional publications. One of her books, Inside of a Dog spent 63 weeks as a New York Times bestseller. Her latest book Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, was published January, 2013. Horowitz’s address to Fechner Day guest is entitled, “Examining Others’ Points of View.”    

 

Dr. Alexandra Horowitz   (Submitted Photo)

Dr. Alexandra Horowitz is a professor of psychology at Barnard College, Columbia University; she earned her Ph.D. in Cognitive Science at the University of California at San Diego. The Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard conducts research on a wide range of topics, including, lately: dog olfaction; inter-species play behavior; and attributions of secondary emotions to dogs. 

In addition to many scholarly articles relating to dog behavior and cognition, she is author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (Scribner, 2009), On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes (Scribner, 2013) and editor of Domestic Dog Cognition and Behavior (Springer-Verlag, 2014).

Dr. Horowitz has appeared in Time Magazine, The New Yorker Magazine, Science Magazine, Smithsonian, and appeared on ABC's "Nature's Edge"

Currently, Dr. Horowitz is testing the olfactory acuity of the domestic dog, through experiments in natural settings, and examining dog-human dyadic play behavior.  

To learn more about Dr. Horowitz you can visit her website.

The event is free and open to all faculty, staff, and students of the University of Missouri- St. Louis.  Following the lecture, guests can enjoy German chocolate cake in honor of Fechner Day.

Photo by: Dr. Alexandra Horowitz.

sources:   https://psychology.barnard.edu/profiles/Alexandra-Horowitz

                http://insideofadog.com/