Prof. Michael I. Posner, First Recipient of the Mattei Dogan Foundation Prize in Psychological Science
Michel Denis
LIMSI‐CNRS, Université de Paris‐Sud, Orsay, France
In July, 2008, the International Union of Psychological Science (IUPsyS) presented the first Mattei Dogan Foundation Prize in Psychological Science at the opening ceremony of the XXIX International Congress of Psychology. The following describes the prize and its history, offers a short biography of the first recipient, Michael I. Posner, and prints the award presentation speech by the Chair of the Jury for this prize (and Past President of the IUPsyS) Michel Denis, and the acceptance speech by Michael Posner.
THE MATTEI DOGAN FOUNDATION PRIZE IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
The Mattei Dogan Foundation Prize in Psychological Science was established in 2006 by the International Union of Psychological Science (IUPsyS) under the generous auspices of the Mattei Dogan Foundation. The Prize is awarded in recognition of a contribution by a scholar or a team of scholars with a high international reputation that constitutes a major advance in psychology. The IUPsyS appointed an international committee, chaired by Michel Denis, Past President of the Union, to award this Prize. The Mattei Dogan Foundation Prize was awarded for the first time on the occasion of the XXIX International Congress of Psychology, Berlin, 20–25 July, 2008, and the award ceremony took place during the Opening Ceremony of the Congress, on 20 July, 2008.
The 2008 Mattei Dogan Foundation Prize was awarded to Prof. Michael I. Posner, from the University of Oregon. Prof. Posner's work connecting psychological science to neuroscience and the study of the human brain marked a significant breakthrough in the study of attention, consciousness, memory, and information processing. His research has combined behavioural experimental paradigms and their brain, genetic, and developmental bases, and has made major empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions to the field of psychology.
The Mattei Dogan Foundation was established in 2001. Its objective is to study the major issues of advanced societies by the methods used in the social sciences. The Foundation has its own scientific program, and it also offers grants to other institutions. Among its actions and initiatives, the Foundation awards prizes to scientists with an international reputation in the social sciences, according to memoranda established with international scientific institutions. For more information about the Mattei Dogan Foundation, please consult the Foundation's website (http://www.fondationmatteidogan.org/indexen.html).
SHORT BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF PROF. MICHAEL I. POSNER
Born in 1936 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Michael Posner is Professor Emeritus at the University of Oregon and Adjunct Professor at the Weill Medical College in New York (Sackler Institute).
After his initial training in physics and psychology, Michael Posner obtained his PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1962. His first teaching position was at the University of Wisconsin. He then moved to the University of Oregon, where he has been continuously affiliated since 1965. During his career, he has been invited as a Visiting Professor to many academic institutions, including Yale University, the University of Delhi, the Cornell Medical College at Rockefeller University, and the University of Minnesota.
From 1985 to 1989, Michael Posner held the position of Professor of Neuropsychology and Psychology at the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery of Washington University, St Louis. He then became the Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences at the University of Oregon (1989–1995), and then Head of the Department of Psychology (1995–1998) and Distinguished Professor at the College of Arts and Science. From 1998 to 2002, he was the Director of the Sackler Institute, which he had founded at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York. In 2003, he became Faculty Coordinator of the Brain, Biology and Machine Initiative at the University of Oregon.
Michael Posner has received many honours and awards during his academic career, including in particular the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award (1980), the William James Book Award for Images of Mind (1996), the John T. McGovern Medal and Lecture of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1998), the Fyssen Foundation International Prize for Studies of Human Consciousness (2004), to name just a few. He has been awarded honorary doctoral degrees from the Universities of Padova (1998), Granada (1999), Nottingham (2002), Paris (2002), the Vrije Universiteit of Brussels (2007), and the Ben‐Gurion University of the Negev (2007).
Michael Posner has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1981. He served on several committees of the National Research Council and on the McArthur Foundation Committee of Scientific Advisers to the Health Program. He has chaired the James S. McDonnell Foundation Committee on Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention and Perception. He edited the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (1974–1979) and was a member of the Board of Editors of Science (1988–1989) and of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2000–2002).
Michael Posner's record of publications includes more than 300 peer‐reviewed scientific articles and chapters. He published the following books as a single author or co‐author:
Fitts, P. M., & Posner, M. I. (1967). Human Performance. Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Posner, M. I. (1973). Cognition: An Introduction. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman & Company.
Posner, M. I. (1978). Chronometric Explorations of Mind. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.
Posner, M. I., & Marin, O. S. M. (Eds.). (1985). Attention and Performance XI: Mechanisms of Attention. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.
Posner, M. I. (Ed.). (1989). Foundations of Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Posner, M. I., & Raichle, M. E. (1994). Images of Mind. New York: Scientific American Library.
Posner, M. I., & Rothbart, M. K. (2007). Educating the Human Brain. Washington, DC: APA Books.
Michael Posner is currently engaged in a project with Mary K. Rothbart, seeking to explain the development of brain networks underlying attention. This work explores the interaction of genes and experience in normal and atypical development.
Introduction of Prof. Michael Posner
Michel Denis
LIMSI‐CNRS, Université de Paris‐Sud, Orsay, France, Past President of the International Union of Psychological Science, Chair of the Jury of the Mattei Dogan Foundation Prize in Psychological Science
I would like to invite the participants of the XXIX International Congress of Psychology to view this Congress as a very special one. This is not only because the outstanding quality of the program has attracted a record‐breaking attendance. The Congress is also very special because it gives us the opportunity of awarding, for the first time, a Prize intended to recognize the outstandfing merits of a member of the psychological community.
For years, the Union has been trying to establish an international prize of this kind. In 2006, an International Prize in Psychological Science was at last created, and this was done with the generous assistance and support of Prof. Mattei Dogan, who created the Mattei Dogan Foundation, a non‐profit foundation based in Paris, which awards prizes in various domains of social sciences.
The Dogan Prize in Psychological Science is intended to be awarded at the Congresses of the IUPsyS. For this purpose, last year, the Union appointed an International Jury, consisting of Prof. Qicheng Jing (China), Mark Rosenzweig (USA), Laura Hernández‐Guzmán (Mexico), Rocio Fernández‐Ballesteros (Spain), and Lars‐Göran Nilsson (Sweden). As Chair of the Jury, I am most grateful to these distinguished colleagues for their help in this important enterprise. The Jury was given the task of selecting a recipient who fitted the Dogan criteria. The Prize is awarded, and I quote, “in recognition of a contribution that represents a major advancement in psychology by a scholar or a team of scholars of high international reputation.”
After reviewing nominations of a number of eminent psychologists from various parts of the world, the Jury ultimately selected one name. As Past President of the Union and Chair of the Dogan Jury, it is my privilege and pleasure to inform the participants of the Congress that the Prize—the first Dogan Prize—will be awarded this year to one of the leading figures of our discipline, Prof. Michael I. Posner, from the University of Oregon, USA.
Before inviting Prof. Posner to step forward to receive his Prize, let me tell you an interesting fact. At about the time the Dogan Prize was established, a group of five Departments and Institutes of Psychology in Berlin and Potsdam quite independently decided to honour a distinguished psychologist by inviting him to give a newly established lecture, the Paul‐B.‐Baltes Lecture, to be delivered during the Berlin Congress. You may like to know that the eminent psychologist selected to give this lecture was ... Michael Posner. This means that Michael Posner is honoured twice during this Congress, and this is highly significant as the two selection processes were totally independent. This provides clear cross‐validation that there are good reasons for psychology to honour Michael Posner.
Let me introduce Michael Posner. It would take more than the time available for this brief introduction to review his work and career. Rather, I will outline the trajectory that has brought him from his early scientific interests to what is considered to be a highly integrated approach to the human mind.
The very first scientific paper published by Michael Posner in 1960 was, in fact, on a topic that many would have considered to be of limited relevance to cognition. It was about acoustics and, more specifically, about habituation to aircraft noise. But, as everyone knows, cognition is present everywhere, even in places where it does not seem to be at first glance. In the sixties, Michael Posner's work on concept formation and what he called the “genesis of abstract ideas” opened new ways of investigating the human mind. His research on human performance had the remarkable merit, at that time, of bringing the issue of motor control into the realm of cognitive psychology. This was the subject of his first book, Human Performance, which he co‐authored with Paul Fitts in 1967. In the same period, Michael Posner's work on attentional processes and his extensive use of chronometric methods for discerning the processes by which the human mind handles information dramatically changed the thinking of psychologists.
Chronometric methods opened new opportunities for psychology when they were applied in the study of patients with neurological damage (such as those suffering impairment of attentional processes). This approach fitted nicely with the longstanding ambition and endeavour of psychology to account for the relationships between mind and brain. It provided a basis for the establishment of cognitive neuroscience, of which Michael Posner is recognized to be the founding figure. Since that time, psychologists, neuropsychologists, and cognitive scientists in general have profoundly changed their approach to research. Neuroimaging has offered a series of increasingly sophisticated methods with which to explore the neural basis of cognition.
Simultaneously with these advances, Michael Posner embarked on the exploration of higher‐level issues. He started looking at developmental and social issues and initiated a series of studies of temperament, testing the assumption that personality factors have an impact on perceptual and cognitive processes. In particular, he investigated the development of executive attention during the early years of life. Later on, he became interested in genetics and took steps to bring together researchers who would contribute to the new field of cognitive genomics, investigating molecular genetics of self‐regulation and its relationship to environmental influence. Investigating aspects of interest to a wide range of experimental and clinical psychologists, he showed that cultural factors (such as the quality of parenting) interact with individual temperamental factors (such as impulsivity and sensation‐seeking). By doing so, he achieved a novel combination of genetics and intervention studies, which opened an exciting and socially relevant new field of research.
This is well illustrated by the recent book co‐authored by Michael Posner and Mary Rothbart, Educating the Human Brain (2007), a major contribution to our understanding of brain development and its relation to education. Other highlights in Michael Posner's bibliography include the famous Chronometric Explorations of Mind (1978), Foundations of Cognitive Science (1989), and Images of Mind (1994), with Marcus Raichle. People of my generation will also remember his book entitled Cognition: An Introduction (1973). This 200‐page book included chapters spanning the issues of representation in memory and abstraction, through symbolic concepts and mental operations, to consciousness, search strategies, and problem solving. For thousands of students, it was an illuminating and inspiring introduction to a new approach in psychology. At that time, it was the most comprehensive review available of the achievements of cognitive psychology. I would be curious to know whether, when he was writing this book in his mid‐thirties, Michael Posner anticipated what has proven to be the fascinating development of his work.
One interesting aspect of Michael Posner's enterprise is that he has attracted students, post‐docs, and junior faculty from around the world, including France, Spain, Germany, Israel, England, The Netherlands, Hungary, Romania, Russia, Argentina, Japan, and China, to name but a few. In this respect, he is not only an American psychologist. He should be viewed as a genuine international research scientist, something for which our Union is especially appreciative.
His contributions have proven to be fundamental to the field of cognition, and to psychology as a discipline, by connecting it to neuroscience, neuropsychology, developmental biology, and genetics. We all recall that this splendid interdisciplinary endeavour has always been deeply and solidly rooted in psychology. Thank you, Michael Posner, for having opened this approach to generations of cognitive scientists.
Acceptance Speech
Michael I. Posner
University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA
First, I want to thank Prof. Denis for his very kind introduction, and my wife Sharon for her gentle guidance over the last 50 years of our life together.
It is a great honour you have given me by the award of the first Mattei Dogan Prize in Psychological Science. Mattei Dogan, the founder of the Dogan Foundation, received his PhD in sociology and spent much of his career in the US and France in the field of political science. He held a position of senior scientist at France's leading institute for scientific research, the CNRS, and his career exemplifies the important connections between social and natural sciences. The Foundation he developed has given prizes in political science, geography, and interdisciplinary fields. I believe this new prize is of special significance to the field of psychology in recognizing the important role that psychology has achieved as an empirical discipline linking social and natural sciences.
There have been many important discoveries that link social and natural sciences and psychology is involved in a number of them. These include such diverse fields as measurement theory (for example, the development of multidimensional scaling by Roger Shepard and the psychophysics of S. S. Stevens); evolutionary psychology (as in the studies of John Tooby and Leda Cosmides and Arne Öhman); the psychological understanding of number (as in the work of Elizabeth Spelke and Stan Dehaene); perhaps most of all in the work on bounded rationality (as in the studies of Herbert Simon and the Nobel Prize‐winning studies of Dan Kahneman, many in conjunction with Amos Tversky and Paul Slovic), to mention a few of the most prominent.
My own efforts have been directed toward links between the study of the human mind as it operates in the complex world of social interaction and the evolution and development of the human brain as an object of special interest to natural science. I have worked with many investigators in pursuit of these goals, including Marc Raichle and his associates at Washington University in St Louis, and those at the Sackler Institute, Department of Psychiatry at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University and at the University of Oregon. These include B. J. Casey, Bruce McCandliss, Jin Fan, John Fossella, Brad Sheese, Charo Rueda, Andrea Berger, and most of all Prof. Mary K. Rothbart. Many colleagues from different countries who worked with us in Eugene and New York over the years are at this meeting, including Pio Tudela (Spain), John Duncan and Marge Eldridge (UK), Eric Siéroff (France), Ray Klein (Canada), Tobias Sommer and Philip Kanske (Germany), Atsuko Nakagawa (Japan) and Bob Rafal (Wales).
Of course, the natural world is too complex to study directly, but it has been the contribution of half a century of cognitive psychology and of artificial intelligence to break up real‐world tasks such as listening to a lecture into component operations—in the case of this meeting, listening to many lectures and reading many posters, and hopefully achieving an overall understanding that could synthesize them into an impression of the state of modern psychology.
Two great discoveries at the end of the 20th century made it possible to achieve connections between the mental operations of psychological theory and the structure of the human brain. The neuroimaging methods of positron emission tomography and functional magnetic imaging have made it possible to examine the neural networks that underlie a wide variety of tasks carried out by humans. Although much of the neuroimaging data refers only to anatomical locations, more recent studies have provided evidence on functional connectivity between brain areas and the order of activations in real time, thus bringing together the anatomically oriented neuroscience with the emphasis on the temporal course of information processing or, as I have called it, mental chronometry. To date, a large number of psychological functions have been studied in this way, including attention and memory systems, reading, mental arithmetic, emotions like fear and pleasure, decision making, and many others.
The human genome project has provided one basis for the examination of individual differences in efficiency between different networks. The association of particular neuro areas with neuro‐modulators and transmitters provides one basis for candidate genes that might modulate neural networks. While some may fear that a genetic basis for the efficiency of networks would submerge the study of experience and socialization, they can be assured that the expression of these genes in individuals can be modified by specific experiences such as parenting and training. It may well be that certain genetic alleles are undergoing positive selection because they make the person more susceptible to these cultural influences, as we will discuss on Tuesday in my lecture in honour of Prof. Paul Baltes. The way the expression of genes interacts with experiences will continue to provide important topics for studies of development in the coming years.
Mary Rothbart and I have argued in a recent Annual Review of Psychology paper that the interrelation of psychology and neuroscience may well serve as a strong basis for the integration of scientific psychology along the lines proposed by Hebb in his 1949 monograph and in his subsequent textbooks in the field. We think this integration would recognize the field of psychology as pivotal in connecting natural and social sciences.
This award is an outstanding recognition of psychology as a discipline. It is in that spirit that I am grateful on behalf of psychology to express my deep appreciation of this recognition from the Dogan Foundation.