Roger Newland Shepard (born January 30, 1929) is an American cognitive scientist and author of the "universal law of generalization" (1987).
He is considered a father of research on spatial relations.
He studied mental rotation, and was an inventor of non-metric multidimensional scaling, a method for representing certain kinds of statistical data in a graphical form that can be apprehended by humans.
The optical illusion called Shepard tables and the auditory illusion called Shepard tones are named for him.