History of the EPS: Overseas Contact

As early as 1947, at the first Annual General Meeting, the EPG agreed that Visiting Foreign Psychologists should be offered one-year membership of the Society. Lawrence Weiskrantz was first a member under this scheme, and many other distinguished visitors have contributed to the life of the Society over the years.

The Society has several times arranged joint meetings with foreign societies. If we have any sister society overseas, it would be the Nederlandse Stichting voor Psychonomie: joint meetings have been held in Amsterdam in April, 1973, in Cambridge in July 1975, in Amsterdam in 1984, and – to mark the centennial of the death of the Dutch ophthalmologist and experimental psychologist F. C. Donders – in Cambridge in July, 1989. Members of Nordiska Forskarförbundet were entertained at the Oxford meeting in 1975, and in 1986 a joint meeting with the Divisione “Ricerca di base” of Italian psychologists was held in Padua. The July meeting in Oxford, in 1987, one of the largest that the EPS has ever organised, was arranged jointly with the Experimental Division of the Canadian Psychological Association. The Canadian link has been maintained through joint meetings with the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Sciences in Toronto (1993) and Cambridge (2000).

It is perhaps now little known that the annual ‘European Conference on Visual Perception’ began in 1978 as a joint meeting in Marburg of the EPS and the Tagung Experimentell Arbeitender Psychologen. The organisers (C. R. Cavonius, I. Rentschler, L. Spillmann and myself) had slight inkling that we were starting what has become a major international meeting, attracting today as many as 500 participants. More recently, experimental psychologists from Germany were welcomed to the EPS meeting at University College London in January, 1996.

J.D. Mollo

  1. History of the EPS: Beginnings
  2. History of the EPS: Meetings
  3. History of the EPS: Overseas Contacts
  4. History of the EPS: Publications
  5. History of the EPS: Membership
  6. Reflections on the Early Days: Past Perceptions
  7. Reflections on the Early Days: The EPS and the EPG
  8. Reflections on the Early Days: ‘….such a light blue tinge’
  9. Oral History
  10. List of EPS Officers and Committee Members