Celeste McCollough facts for kids

Celeste McCollough Howard, born in 1927, is an American psychologist. She studies how humans see things. She is famous for discovering something called the McCollough effect in 1965. This was the first "contingent aftereffect" ever found.

What Did Celeste McCollough Do?

Celeste McCollough started her career after studying at Columbia University. From 1954 to 1956, she taught at Olivet College. Later, she became the first woman to get a full-time job in the Psychology Department at Oberlin College.

Discovering the McCollough Effect

In 1962 and 1963, she took a break to do research in Canada. She studied how people saw things when wearing glasses with two different colored lenses. This research led her to discover the special effect named after her. Her discovery was so important that it led to hundreds of other scientific studies.

Returning to Research

In 1970, McCollough left her job at Oberlin College to focus on her family. She returned to studying vision in 1986. She worked with the University of Dayton Research Institute (UDRI).

Studying Color and Vision

Her work involved looking at how color is used in flight simulators for the Air Force. She also studied how people see in dim light. This led her to work with an international group called the International Commission on Illumination (CIE). They focused on how our eyes see in low light, which is called mesopic photometry. She also researched how the McCollough effect relates to how our brains process patterns.

After 1995, she joined a program that trained people for night vision. This included studying how pilots adapt to dim light in cockpits while wearing night vision goggles. In 2003, McCollough retired and moved to Portland, Oregon.