Mary Hayhoe
Mary Myleen Hayhoe is an Australian‑American psychologist who studies vision. She uses virtual environments to study how people use what they see to guide their movements. She has received several major awards, including the Davida Teller Award from the Vision Sciences Society in 2017, the Edgar D. Tillyer Award from Optica in 2002, and the Kurt Koffka Medal in 2024 for advancing perception or developmental psychology.
Hayhoe was born in Australia and studied psychology and mathematics at the University of Queensland. She then studied at the University of Cambridge from 1970 to 1973. In 1973 she moved to the United States to work as a research associate in psychology at Florida State University. She did graduate research at the University of California, San Diego, where she studied how eyes adapt to dark environments, and her PhD thesis was Lateral interaction in the control of sensitivity during dark adaptation (1979).
Her academic career included a faculty position at the University of Rochester starting in 1984, where she advanced to full professor and in 1998 became Director of the Cognitive Science Program. In 2006 she moved to the University of Texas at Austin, where she continues to study visual sensation and the relationship between vision and movement.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 12:14 (CET).