Although Boring conducted a lot of research during his career, most of it resulted in minor contributions to psychology. The vast majority of his research centered around sensory and perceptual phenomena. However, most of his time was spent teaching, doing administrative work, writing, editing, or guiding the research of his graduate students. Later in his career Boring became interested in the perceptual ambiguity of figure-ground phenomena. He discussed cartoonist W. E. Hill's "
My Wife and My Mother-in-Law" in a 1930 journal article, explaining that this illustration was an accurate representation of the phenomena because the two different images are interpenetrating one another with no formal dividing line. He contrasted this image to
Edgar Rubin's
Rubin vase figure, where he felt that there is an obvious dividing line between the human profiles and goblets.
Tonal brightness research One graduate student with whom Boring developed a student-professor relationship similar to the one Boring had had with
Titchener was
Stanley Smith Stevens. The question that Stevens and Boring researched was concerning the bright and dull tones that could be produced with a siren when the holes were appropriately spaced, hypothesizing that brightness varies with both the intensity and the frequency of the pitch. Boring and fellow researcher A. H. Holway hypothesized that the Moon appears larger on the horizon because the eyes view it directly at a leveled position, while the Moon overhead appears smaller because the eyes must look up. Boring later resigned from
Harvard University in 1949 and in that same year published the second edition of
A History of Experimental Psychology where he brought the text up to date on advancements in the field of psychology. Boring describes the standard procedure men undergo to achieve prestige in their career: a man must receive a PhD, conduct meaningful research that gets published, and undertake administrative work. If work is done well enough to impress their boss, men are likely to be promoted to higher positions and work in broader tasks such as publishing books, or becoming a dean or college president, allowing them to influence a wider range of people. It was the pursuit of prestige at higher positions that women lacked, largely because they were blocked from the higher-level jobs in the first place.
Psychology One, 1956 Boring appeared on
Psychology One, which was the first publicly televised introductory psychology course that aired in 1956. The program was designed to introduce psychology to the general public and provided an entertaining but insightful form of instruction. Among the topics Boring discussed on the show were the physics of sensations such as light and sound, the structures of sense organs, perceptual constancy and illusions and learning.
Psychologist at Large: Autobiography, 1961 In 1961 Boring published a text about his career and life experiences. The book was titled
Psychologist at Large: an Autobiography and Selected Essays. It was the extension of a chapter written previously for the series he had edited since 1930,
A History of Psychology in Autobiography, which at that time was four volumes and contained autobiographical narratives by 58 eminent psychologists.
Psychologist at Large was Boring's last book to be published.
Contemporary Psychology In his seventies he continued to make contributions to the field through his writing. He founded and edited a journal that was dedicated exclusively to psychology book reviews,
Contemporary Psychology. In this journal, Boring was able to shape the psychological works that were published. He demanded a high degree of quality which challenged psychologists to rise to his standard. == Legacy==