Jan Bronislaw Deregowski is a Polish-born psychologist and psychology educator whose career at the University of Aberdeen focused on visual perception, pictorial representation, and cross-cultural psychology. His research examined how cultural experience relates to the perception of pictures, illusions, symmetry, depth, and artistic style.
Background
Jan Bronislaw Deregowski was born on March 1, 1933, in Pinsk, then in Poland, to Jan Deregowski and Szczeslawa Helena Enskajt. Pinsk was a multilingual and historically diverse city in the eastern borderlands of interwar Poland; the city is now located in Belarus.
His early adult life was connected with Britain, where he studied at the University of London and developed the academic career that later took him to Africa and Scotland. His research interests brought together experimental psychology, visual perception, anthropology, and the study of artistic representation.
Education
Deregowski studied at the University of London, receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in 1960, a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1965, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in psychology in 1968. The University of London, established in 1836, was a federal institution whose colleges and external programs helped broaden access to advanced education in Britain. His doctoral research addressed pictorial perception with particular reference to Central Africa.
He later received a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Aberdeen in 1988. Founded in 1495, Aberdeen is one of Scotland's ancient universities and has long combined broad academic education with research in the sciences and humanities. His later association with the university placed his work within a Scottish center of psychological research and higher education.
Career
Deregowski began his working life in Britain in engineering and operations research positions with the Ministry of Overseas Department from 1956 to 1964, while completing his university education. His early work preceded his transition into academic psychology and provided a professional background in analytical and research-oriented activity.
From 1965 to 1969 he was a research fellow at the University of Zambia in Lusaka. The university, established in 1965 soon after Zambian independence, became the country's principal institution for higher education and research. At its Institute for Social Research, Deregowski carried out research on pictorial recognition, visual perception, and cultural differences in the interpretation of images.
Deregowski joined the University of Aberdeen in 1969 as a lecturer in psychology. He became a senior lecturer in 1977, a reader in 1981, and professor in 1986. Aberdeen's psychology community supported research spanning experimental, social, and cross-cultural approaches, and Deregowski remained associated with the university as Professor Emeritus.
His research examined pictorial depth, symmetry, orientation, illusions, shape constancy, and the perception of two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional objects. Studies involving African, Scottish, American, and other populations questioned the assumption that pictorial perception is entirely automatic and emphasized the interaction between perceptual mechanisms, learning, and cultural experience. His later work extended these questions to artistic style, rock art, graphic representation, and the psychological interpretation of visual forms.
Achievements
Deregowski developed a substantial body of cross-cultural research on visual perception, demonstrating that experience with pictures and cultural environments can affect the interpretation of pictorial depth, orientation, symmetry, illusions, and represented objects.
His research connected experimental psychology with the study of artistic representation, providing psychological perspectives on artistic style, graphic perception, colour in painting, and the interpretation of historical and archaeological images.
(Co-authored with Benjamin W. Tatler, this article conside...)
2020
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Deregowski's work treated perception as a psychological process shaped by both general perceptual capacities and culturally learned practices. His cross-cultural studies argued that differences in experience with pictures, built environments, and artistic conventions can affect how people interpret depth, orientation, form, and representation.
His later writing connected experimental psychology with the history of art and archaeology. He maintained that the study of graphic perception could help explain both the production and interpretation of images, including images created by cultures separated from the modern viewer by geography or historical time.
Membership
Deregowski was a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, a professional body representing psychology and psychologists in the United Kingdom. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy, whose fellowship recognizes significant contributions to intellectual and scientific life.
He was a fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study during the 1983–1984 academic year. The institute provides an interdisciplinary setting in which scholars develop research projects away from their ordinary institutional duties; Deregowski used the fellowship for work on the historical and psychological significance of colour in painting and related studies of visual representation.
Fellow
British Psychological Society
,
United Kingdom
Fellow
Royal Society of Edinburgh
,
United Kingdom
Research fellow
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study
,
Netherlands
September 1, 1983 - August 31, 1984
Interests
Visual perception, pictorial representation, artistic style, colour in painting, rock art, and cross-cultural psychology.
Connections
Deregowski married Eva Loft Nielsen in 1958. They had three children: Sven Marek Deregowski, Niels Tadeusz Deregowski, and Anna Halina Deregowski.
His parents were Jan Deregowski and Szczeslawa Helena Enskajt. His professional collaborations included research with Robert Serpell, Denis M. Parker, D. N. Perkins, and other psychologists working on perception, cross-cultural psychology, and visual cognition.
Deregowski, Jan Bronislaw
A reference entry describing Deregowski's birth in Pinsk, doctoral education, African research, and contributions to cross-cultural psychology.
