Collecting area: Cognitive science

Access restrictions: Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA in advance to request materials from this collection.

The founding director of UMass Amherst’s Computer Science Department, Michael Arbib’s research on neuroscience and computing has been significantly influential and led to work on early neural networks and advances in both our understanding of the brain and artificial intelligence and computing. Born in 1940, Arbib was raised and educated in New Zealand and Australia, earning a BSc in 1960 at the University of Sydney. He then came to the US, earning his PhD at MIT and working closely with Warren McCulloch. Arbib was an assistant professor at Stanford University for five years before joining the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he helped found the Computer and Information Science Department. He left UMass in 1986 for the University of Southern California, where he is currently the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science. Arbib has been prolific, publishing almost forty books and hundreds of articles and continues to do research on the coordination of perception and action in both human cognition and machine vision, neural networks, and robotics.

The Michael Arbib Papers are a rich documentation of Arbib’s work while at Stanford and the University of Massachusetts, including his complete professional correspondence during that period, research files and notes, manuscript drafts of his publications, and the records of his administration of the Computer Science Department at UMass.

Arnold Trehub, born in Malden, Mass. in 1923, was an active and very well respected cognitive scientist and researcher, artist, and World War II veteran. Trehub earned his BA from Northeastern University and his PhD from Boston University, though his undergraduate education was interrupted by the War. Serving in the Pacific Theater, he worked as a radio technician for B-29 bombers, two of which were the Enola Gay and the Bockscar. For most of his professional life, Trehub was the director of a research lab at the VA Hospital in Leeds, Mass. and an adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research on the neurophysiology of the human brain and the nature of consciousness appeared in numerous journals and edited volumes and his best known book, The Cognitive Brain, was published by MIT press in 1991. Trehub was a resident of Amherst since 1954 and passed away on April 3rd, 2017.

The Arnold Trehub Papers primarily document his work as a cognitive scientist, including drafts and copies of articles, research data, research notes on paper and as digital files, and a rich collection of Trehub’s professional email correspondence. In addition to the content of his research, the Trehub Papers also exhibit the processes and approach of early personal computer-aided research design, data design, and research graphics. There is also a small amount of Trehub’s undergraduate student work.