Myron Lee Braunstein OBITUARY

Myron Lee Braunstein, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California, Irvine, passed away on June 12, 2024. Born in New York on September 3, 1936 to Anne and Hyman Braunstein, he moved to Newport Beach, California, in July 1965. Myron (“Mike”) was a graduate of Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn and Brooklyn College. His M.S. (1959) and Ph.D. (1961) in Psychology were earned at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His first professional appointments in 1961 and 1963 were as a research psychologist at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory of Cornell University (now Calspan) and at the Flight Safety Foundation, where he conducted research in light aircraft accident investigation and in visual perception. His first academic appointment in 1965 was in the Cognitive Sciences Department at the University of California, Irvine. He has over 70 research publications including a monograph “Depth Perception Through Motion,” published by Academic Press in 1976. He authored an article on Depth Perception in the “Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science,” published by Wiley in 2006. Mike’s research focused on the use of heuristic processes in both visual perception and decision making. He believed that the visual system is not designed to provide mathematical accuracy in perception but rather to provide rapid approximate solutions to meet the observer’s biological needs. Similarly, he believed that decision processes do not need to provide mathematically optimum solutions but to provide approximate solutions to meet the decision maker’s needs. He was a Fellow in the American Psychological Association and in the American Psychological Society. He loved cats, especially Midnight, who was with him for eighteen years. He is survived by his best friend of 20 years, Wayne Saber, nephews David Robert Horowitz and Steven Jay Horowitz and grand niece, Alexis Horowitz. Donations in his memory to the Best Friends Animal Society would be appropriate.