(I’m applying for PhD programs for Fall 2011. This is the first draft of what will eventually become my Statement of Purpose. I imagine the final version will have, among other changes, a lot less information about my mom. But I thought you guys might be interested.)

Katharine A. Tillman
Statement of Purpose

I have loved language all my life. My mother is a voracious reader of such high caliber that these days she often complains of being unable to find anything worth reading that she hasn’t already read in an entire public library. I grew up surrounded by books, being read to and reading. I started keeping journals at a very young age. I was publishing my writing on the Internet by the time I was 14 years old and in print magazines by the time I was 18. I wanted to be a writer more than anything.

My mother, the eternal bookworm, discovered somewhat late in life that she also had an interest in and talent for science. The hard sciences satisfied her thirst for concrete and verifiable knowledge about the world in a way literature courses never had. When I was in elementary school, she went back to college for a degree in Biology. By the time I was in middle school, she was pursuing a masters in human genetics. She taught me how to do Punnett squares, to match up chromosomes for karyotypes, and to breed fruit flies with funny wings and eyes. I thought all this was a lot of fun, but I still considered myself to be an “arts person,” not a “science person.” I wanted to study writing, or philosophy, or art.

I changed my tune somewhat when I took AP Biology my senior year in high school. My teacher, Ben Davis, was phenomenal, and it remains one of the best and most rigorous classes I have ever taken. I stayed up all night studying. I loved it. I started my undergraduate career at NYU as a Biology major, taking junior-level molecular and cell biology courses my first semester of freshman year. Looking for a work-study job, I found an opening for an RA position in Denis Pelli’s lab in the Psychology Department. He and his students studied visual perception.

Denis, it turned out, came from a family of artists, and was interested in the question of beauty. This was one of my favorite topics in philosophy, and the moment when I realized that it was actually possible to ask (and answer!) questions about how people see the world from a scientific perspective – even question about aspects of perception as seemingly ephemeral as what makes a particular painting beautiful to a particular observer – completely changed my life. I still remember that moment vividly. I was 18 years old; it was nearly a decade ago.

I worked in Denis’ lab for one semester, and then, for personal reasons unrelated to school, I left NYU entirely for almost 3 years. During that time, I travelled all over the country, worked in a yoga studio in Washington, DC, wrote, and did freelance technical editing for the Journal of Vision, which was then very new. When I decided to return to New York and my studies in 2004, Denis offered me a full-time job as a researcher and lab manager. One of the perks of this was that I could take NYU classes part-time, for free.

In the five years it took me to complete my BA, with a major in Psychology and minors in Creative Writing and Classics, part-time, I also published 3 papers in collaboration with Denis and other members of the lab, presented my work at 8 conferences, learned vast amounts about psychophysical research, and, as lab manager, about teaching, mentoring, NIH grant proposals, and dealing with the IRB. Most importantly, I learned how to think critically. I learned what makes a scientific question interesting and what makes an argument convincing. I vehemently denied it almost the whole way through, but I became a scientist. Thanks to Denis’ unwavering concern for my development and rigorous intellectual standards, I became a very well-trained one.

My first scientific paper, “Parts, wholes, and context in reading: A triple dissociation” (Pelli & Tillman, PLoS One, 2007), used a novel knock-out method of text manipulation to prove that word shape, letter-by-letter decoding, and sentence context make independent, additive contributions to reading rate in words/min. It received press coverage from sources as diverse as Scientific American, BoingBoing, and FontFeed. My second paper, “Crowding and eccentricity determine reading rate” (Pelli, Tillman, et al., JOV, 2007), was a mammoth with several mathematical appendices, laying out the visual factors constraining how fast we read text. My most recent paper, “The uncrowded window of object recognition” (Pelli & Tillman 2008), a review of what studies of vision crowding have taught us about how the brain combines features to recognize objects, was published as a Perspective in Nature Neuroscience.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, it still took me another year to realize that I really was a scientist, and that a career in academia is not only what I have been preparing for all my life, but also what I am best suited for and I what I want. The “problem” has always been that I have so many other interests. I still publish my creative writing (both fiction and essays). I show my photographs in exhibitions. I have had an intense contemplative spiritual practice for ten years. I thought that in order to give all these other pursuits the attention they deserved, I needed to leave the lab. I tested this theory for one year, and found it to completely and utterly false. My “outside” interests inform my research, making it better, and the converse is also true. The theme underlying all these diverse passions is the same: a tremendous, unwavering fascination with both minds in general and my own mind in particular.

I want to understand how people perceive the world, think, and narrate their experiences. I am fascinated by the questions of how language influences seeing and vice versa. I want to know the relationship between language and memory – how the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are and what our past histories have been constrain how we see and interpret our present surroundings and situations.

I’m currently working on a paper, “Reading pictures” (Tillman & Pelli, in prep), which presents evidence that reading and object recognition, two tasks traditionally studied separately by language and vision researchers, are in fact remarkably similar, perhaps relying on the same cognitive processes. In my graduate work, I hope to continue in this vein, combining my interests in perception and language.

Moreover, I want to ask the big questions in cognitive psychology. I don’t want to be another cog in the research machine churning out papers documenting tiny advances in obscure topics that only matter to a tiny group of expert specialists and will never be heard of by ordinary people. I want to be a scientist, psychologist, scholar, academic, and professor in the highest sense of those words: a fearless and unapologetic intellectual whose work is devoted to the cause of pursuing knowledge and understanding for the benefit of everyone. It’s a lofty and idealistic goal, I know, but I am sure that the next step is to begin working toward a doctoral degree.