Prof. Dr. Michael Kubovy -- in memoriam

Legacy

Michael Kubovy, Psychologist, Polymath; 

He saw Life as a Series of 'Extraordinary Accidents,' He died at 85 on 21 August 2025.

Role

Until 08/2025: Senior International Research Fellow

Education

  • BA, psychology, philosophy, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • PhD, Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Website: http://people.virginia.edu/~mk9y/

Research Interests

Auditory, visual, and cross-modal perception, psychology of art, the structure of lives, and the philosophy of mind.

Research Description

In the lab, Michael studied auditory and visual perception in normal adults. Outside the lab, he studied the psychology of art , and was developing a theory of pleasure. 

 

Selected works

Yu M, Getz L, Kubovy M, Perceiving the initial note: Quantitative models of how listeners parse cyclical auditory patterns., 2015; Attention, perception & psychophysics. () . PMID: 26337611

Tolleson CM, Dobolyi D, Roman OC, Kanoff K, Barton S, Wylie SA, Kubovy M, Claassen DO, Dysrhythmia of timed movements in Parkinson׳s disease and freezing of gait., 2015; Brain research. () . PMID: 26241766

Getz LM, Salona P, Yu M, Kubovy M, Competition between rhythmic and linguistic organization in a sentence-rhythm Stroop task., 2015; Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006). 68(11) 2243-54. PMID: 25747914

Getz LM, Barton S, Kubovy M, The specificity of expertise: for whom is the clave pattern the "key" to salsa music?, 2014; Acta psychologica. 152() 56-66. PMID: 25113127

Strother L, Kubovy M, Structural salience and the nonaccidentality of a Gestalt., 2012; Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance. 38(4) 827-32. PMID: 22486306

Kubovy M, Yu M, Multistability, cross-modal binding and the additivity of conjoined grouping principles., 2012; Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences. 367(1591) 954-64. PMID: 22371617 | PMCID: PMC3282311

van den Berg M, Kubovy M, Schirillo JA, Grouping by Regularity and the perception of illumination., 2011; Vision research. 51(12) 1360-71. PMID: 21549740