Cornsweet is known for documenting the effect that bears his name in the 1960s. Prior to his work on this particular optical illusion, Cornsweet graduated from Cornell University and enrolled in a graduate program at Brown University, operating in the vision research laboratory of Lorrin A. Riggs. During his graduate studies he was co-author of an early paper describing stabilized images. His 1955 Ph.D. dissertation in experimental psychology involved small movements of the eye. Cornsweet was an assistant professor at Yale University from 1955–1959, and then became professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. His interest in psychophysics led him to develop a widely employed improvement in the staircase method. As an outgrowth of the courses he taught, Cornsweet published a frequently-cited textbook.
Inventor and entrepreneur
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Cornsweet was a key member of the Bioinformation Systems Group at the Stanford Research Institute. While also teaching in the psychology department at Stanford University, he designed or co-designed several innovative instruments for measuring properties of the eye, including eyetrackers, auto-refractors, and optical fundus scanners. He left SRI to become Chief Scientist at Acuity Systems, where he developed the first commercial auto-refractor in 1973. During this time, Cornsweet continued to invent devices for measuring various properties of the eye and also to teach, first at the Baylor College of Medicine and later at the University of California, Irvine. He served as Vice President of research and development for Sensory Technologies from 1994 to 1997. In 1999 Cornsweet retired from UC–Irvine and co-founded Visual Pathways, where his team developed an automated retinal imaging system intended for the diagnoses of glaucoma, cataracts, diabetic retinopathy and macular degeneration. Visual Pathways folded after several years after shipping only 24 devices. Until his death in 2017, Cornsweet was Professor of Cognitive Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Ophthalmology, Emeritus, University of California, Irvine. From 2013 to 2015, he was Chief Scientist at Brien Holden Vision Diagnostics, a company developing low-cost ophthalmic instruments for detection and monitoring of disease.
Patents and awards
40 patents, primarily in the area of optical and ophthalmic instrumentation
Cornsweet wrote three books and published more than 100 journal articles. ; Books
Why is Everything!: Doing Science
; Journal articles
T.N. Cornsweet. PhD Thesis Publication No. 13, 163. University Microfilms, Library of Congress #MICA 55-1914.
T.N. Cornsweet. "Measuring movements of the retinal image with respect to the retina". In: Biomedical Sciences Instrumentation, Volume 2, Plenum Press.
T.N. Cornsweet. Stabilized image techniques. National Academy of Sciences Symposium, "Recent developments in vision research."
T.N. Cornsweet. The Purkinje-image method of recording eye position. In: Eye movements and psychological processes, Monty and Senders, eds., Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, Inc.
T.N. Cornsweet. The Bezold-Brucke effect and its complement, hue constancy. In: Visual Psychophysics: The physiological foundations. Academic Press.
T.N. Cornsweet, S. Hersh, R. Beesmer, and D. Cornsweet. Quantification of the shape and color of the optic nerve head. In: Advances in diagnostic visual optics. Breinin and Siegal, eds, Springer-Verlag.
J.I. Yellott, B.A. Wandell, and T. N. Cornsweet. The beginnings of visual perception. In: Handbook of Physiology, Vol. III, The nervous system. Darian Smith, ed. The American Physiological Society.
