After graduate school, Hochberg became an instructor at Cornell University and was promoted to full professor by 1960. He was a professor at New York University between 1965 and 1969 before moving to Columbia University, where he finished his teaching career.[5]
Hochberg was a leading experimentalist and theoretician in visual perception for half a century. Among his many contributions, he pioneered work on how we integrate the snapshot-views of the world with individual visual fixations into fully-formed percepts of the world “in the mind’s eye.” He led research and thinking on the Gestalt problem and how our percepts are structured to maximize both the likelihood of their being accurate and their simplicity. Beyond his explorations of form and motion perception, Hochberg extended his reach into the perception of pictures, film, and dance.[5]
In the 1950s, Hochberg led a study that examined how college students judged qualities like cuteness and intelligence based on physical features.[6] The study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research, found that college students studied in the same year showed consistency in judging facial expressions, but students from a given year tended not to agree with students studied in other years. This suggested that over time there are trends in judging people. Hochberg found that there was an exception to the discrepancies seen in students from different years: judgments of the cuteness of babies tended to remain stable over time.[7]
Personal life
Hochberg married and he and his wife had three children. He built the family house in upstate New York. He died on May 22, 2022, at the age of 98.[2]
