ABSTRACT
Munehira Akita is known for his long service to the International Ergonomics Association as a council member, representing the Japan Ergonomics Society since 1982.
Akita was born in Kyoto, Japan in 1930. He studied psychology at Kyoto University, Kyoto, obtaining a BA in 1953 and a MA in 1955. Taturo Yatabe, a mentor, taught him psychology as one of the biological sciences. He joined the School of General Studies of the university in 1955. He continued his psychophysical studies of the sensory perception of color and light, some of the time under Koiti Motokawa, and also studied the time order effects of weight sensation employed with electromyogram (EMG), as well as teaching an introductory course of experimental psychology. In 1957 he helped Koji Sato to publish a new English journal, Psychologia — an international journal of psychology in the Orient. In 1959 he went to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA as a graduate student of the Fulbright exchange program. He worked under Mathew Alpern as his research assistant at the Eye Research Institute. During this time they collaborated on an extensive study of the phenomena of visual contrast. They also studied the effects of varying duration of flashes on simultaneous brightness contrast and the comparative amount of contrast effects in binocular as opposed to monocular experiments. While at Michigan, he met Paul Fitts and attended his classes.
