William T. Powers (August 29, 1926 – May 24, 2013) was a medical physicist and an independent scholar of experimental and theoretical psychology[1][2][3] who developed the perceptual control theory (PCT) model of behavior as the control of perception.
He was the son of the well-known cement scientist and economist Treval Clifford Powers.
[4] PCT demonstrates that rather than controlling their behavioral outputs, living things control their perceptual inputs, and explains how they vary their behavior as the means of controlling inputs to their sense organs.
[8] Powers and his students and colleagues in diverse fields have developed many demonstrations of autonomous negative feedback control with endogenously generated reference values, and computer models or simulations that replicate observed and measured behavior of living systems (human and animal, individuals and groups of individuals) with a very high degree of fidelity (0.95 or better).
[9][10] Powers also designed the board game Trippples,[11] originally produced by Benassi Enterprises, later transferred to Aladdin Industries and granted US Patent 3,820,791 in 1974[12] He published a number of science fiction stories.