Obituary: Thomas Gillie Russell Bower, Professor of Human Development

Professor Tom Bower: Professor of human development and pioneer in the study of the infant mind

Tom Bower was a leading light in a new natural science of the infant mind that grew in the 1960s and 70s. He became an acute observer of activities that indicate an imaginative awareness of the outside world exists from birth. He showed that infants a few weeks old explore with several senses what an inexperienced human body can do, with head, eyes, arms and hands, and how they locate objects and identify them with properties that might be used.

He helped us study and think about how our separate senses make sense for a single self.

Tom was born on Christmas Eve, 1941, in Dunfermline, Fife. His father was a slate miner who died when Tom was 17, and his mother was a seamstress. He grew up on Headwell Road with younger brother Alex, and was educated at the Canmore Primary School and Dunfermline High School.

An outstanding scholar and athlete, Tom went to Edinburgh University on a classics bursary in 1959, where one of his many jobs was working as a rigger on the first Forth Road Bridge. He won medals and certificates for running, including Scottish Schools Champion for the 440 yards and, in 1961, received a University Blue, the most prestigious award that can be received by an Edinburgh University athlete.

He loved speed skating and later in life enjoyed walking and climbing in the Trossachs and the Highlands, and snorkelling in Greece, Grand Cayman and Florida.

At Edinburgh University Tom gained his MA with First Class Honours in Psychology in 1963. That year he was awarded the Drever Prize in Psychology, with Mark P Haggard. In 1963 he also received the Sir William Darling Memorial Prize. He then studied at Cornell University with the renowned developmental psychologist Eleanor Gibson, who supervised his PhD in Experimental Psychology with Ethnology and Child Development, which he completed in record time in 1965.

In his 20s, Tom gained a post as Research Associate, then Assistant Professor, at Harvard University, where a revolution of understanding of child psychology and education was under way.

Then, in 1969, Tom came home to Scotland as lecturer in Psychology and was recruited to a rapidly growing project concentrating on the natural science of the developing mind of the child.

He set up a laboratory for observation of infant behaviours and experimental studies of their perception. He became an inspiring teacher of the foundations of mental development, and advanced to Reader in 1978, and to Professor in 1984.

Through the 1970s and 80s Tom was invited to take visiting posts at the Piaget Centre, Geneva and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University.

He was also a Visiting Professor at Brussels University, and Directeur d’ Études at the École des Hautes Études, Paris.

Most importantly, after an influential article in the journal Scientific American on The Visual World of Infants, in 1966, and another on The Object in the World of the Infant in 1971, Tom produced a series of books that became classics in the field: Development in Infancy, W H Freeman & Co, 1974 (2nd edition 1982); A Primer of Infant Development, WH Freeman & Co, 1977; Pathways in Development, OECD Publications, 1977; The Perceptual World of the Child, Open Books Publishing Ltd, 1977; Human Development, W H Freeman & Co, 1979; and The Rational Infant: Learning in Infancy, W H Freeman & Co, 1989.

In 1988 Tom returned to the US as Founders Professor of Human Development, University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), where he was given the opportunity to advance his research into study of newborn intelligence and learning, and he worked on the effects of sensory and motor handicap on development, and on ways of mitigating these effects. He retired as a Emeritus Professor at UTD in 2011.

Tom died of respiratory failure after contracting pneumonia in hospital, where he was recovering from a hip fracture. He is survived by four children Nick, Eleanor, Clio and Pennie, and grandson Jamie.

• Colwyn Trevarthen, FRSE is Professor (Emeritus) of Child Psychology and Psychobiology, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, The University of Edinburgh

TRIBUTES FROM COLLEAGUES

“I first met Tom at Harvard in 1966. He helped me greatly to find my feet in perception, action and development. These were new fields for me, and became my lifelong interest.

“Tom and I spent many hours discussing temporal aspects of perception. Also, he introduced me to Professor James J Gibson, the renowned ecological perception psychologist, whom Tom had known at Cornell and with whom I later studied, before moving to Edinburgh in 1970, shortly after Tom.”

David N Lee, Professor Emeritus of Perception Action and Development, and Director of the international Perception Movement Action Research Consortium, University of Edinburgh.

“I came to Edinburgh in 1976, a time of great change within developmental psychology. As an ethologist I was very excited by the theoretical position taken by Tom on early infant development, suggesting that knowledge of the outside world existed from birth.”

Tom Pitcairn, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Retired, Edinburgh University.

“I met Tom Bower for the first time at a conference on infant development at Harvard where he had his first position following his barely noticeable time as a graduate student. In the next few years he transformed psychology’s view of early development in ways that, 50 years later, are still echoing in current theory and research.”

John S Watson, Professor Emeritus of the University of California at Berkley.

“Tom Bower was one of the pioneers in understanding the inner world and repertoire of infants. His creative techniques and insights were important building blocks for our current understanding of infant development,” said Dr Bert Moore, Dean of the School. “Tom was also an important figure in our own developmental psychology program. The weight of his teachings can still be seen in our research labs and clinical services.”

“Dr Bower was a seminal figure in the field of infant cognitive development,” said Assistant Professor Dr Noah Sasson, who recalls studying Bower’s work in graduate school.

“Anyone who has studied this field has invariably encountered his work, or at the very least has felt his influence upon it.

“Dr Bower pioneered creative methods for assessing the perceptual and cognitive capacities of young infants to determine what they understood about the physical world.”

School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas