Noted researcher Lorrin Riggs dies
01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, April 10, 2008
Lorrin A. Riggs, internationally known for his vision research during his 39-year career on the Brown University faculty, died Tuesday at Kendal at Hanover, the retirement community in Hanover, N.H., where he lived for the past 18 years. He was 95.
Born in Harpoot, Turkey, to American missionary parents — his father was president of Euphrates College, an American university there — he joined the psychology department at Brown in 1938, retiring in 1977 as the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor and Edgar J. Marston Professor of Psychology.
He received an honorary degree from Brown in 2001, sharing the stage that year with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Kofi Annan, then secretary-general of the United Nations, and novelist Philip Roth, among others.
The citation referred to his work in developing the stabilized image technique, “which was a critical step in revealing how the eye sees and how the brain receives visual information.” He and his students also developed techniques now routinely used in diagnosing diseases of the retina and visual pathways.
He was a past president of the Eastern Psychological Association, a board member of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and held memberships in several other scientific organizations.
Among his many honors and awards was the Howard Crosby Warren Medal, the highest award presented by the Society of Experimental Psychologists, which he received in 1957. In the late1960s, he was a distinguished visiting professor at Cambridge University.
Riggs moved to Kendal at Hanover with his late wife, Doris Riggs, in 1990. After her death in 1992, he married a fellow Kendal resident, Caroline Cressman. Besides his wife, he leaves two sons, Douglas Riggs of Newport, book editor for The Providence Journal, and Dwight Riggs of Phoenix, Ariz., and three grandchildren.