Cognitive Science

Kia Nobre, professor of Translational Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, will be awarded the C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science 2022. The award honours her innovative approach to imaging and understanding the human brain as well as the impact of this work on numerous subfields of cognitive neuroscience, including attention, working memory, long-term memory, and language.

The Heineken Prizes are the Netherlands’ most prestigious international science prizes. Every two years they are awarded to five distinguished researchers. The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences is responsible for the nomination and selection process. During the first week of June, a 2022 laureate will be announced every weekday. Previous laureates of the C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science include Robert Zatorre (2020) and Nancy Kanwisher (2018). The award was established in 2006 by Charlene L. De Carvalho-Heineken.

About the study
Nobre studies how our brains combine signals from our environment and our memory to shape experiences and direct perception, attention, language, and behaviour. Among other things, she focuses on how our brain can concentrate on the most relevant signals from the environment and the relevant items in our short-term memory. She explains: ‘At its core, selective attention is the prioritisation and selection of relevant information by our brain to anticipate and modify our behaviour. At any given moment, there is a gigantic number of signals available, coming from external stimuli from our surroundings and internal stimuli such as memories. These signals are constantly competing to be processed in the brain. Selecting and synthesising the most relevant signals amidst all these distractions is essential for building coherent sensory perception, understanding and producing language, and accomplishing everyday tasks like cooking or driving.’

Nobre’s research group has played a major role in developing knowledge of the structure of the brain’s attentional control network. Among other things, she discovered that the brain can make predictions about the timing of relevant events, and that these predictions determine where we focus our attention and, so, influence our perception. Nobre recently developed new methods to study how long-term memories affect our perception. Nobre uses the knowledge she gains about the brain to research what happens in the case of neurodegenerative diseases. The knowledge of how the brain processes information and creates a mental experience is of great importance for education, for example.

Jury praises pioneering role in cognitive science
The jury, with chair Roshan Cools, professor of cognitive neuropsychiatry at Radboud University Nijmegen and the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, is impressed not only by the depth but also by the breadth of Nobre’s research, and its impact. It has identified her as a pioneering and distinguished researcher who has helped to pioneer the transition from cognitive psychology to cognitive neuroscience. Nobre was among the first to use several revolutionary techniques to image the brain. For example, early in her career, she measured brain activity via electrodes in the brains of epilepsy patients who had had these electrodes implanted. This led to the discovery of new areas of the brain that play a role in processing words, a major breakthrough in understanding the language network in the human brain. The jury also recognises her commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion, for her exceptional mentoring and leadership skills, and calls her a role model for women scientists.

About Kia Nobre
Kia Nobre (Rio de Janeiro, 1963) grew up in Rio de Janeiro and studied neuroscience at Williams College in Williamstown. In 1993, she received her PhD in neuroscience from Yale University. After a postdoc at Yale and a research position at Harvard Medical School, she moved to the United Kingdom in 1994. She became a faculty member of the Department of Experimental Psychology and a tutorial fellow at the University of Oxford, and was promoted to professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in 2006. Since 2010, she has been director of the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity. In 2014, she became the first Chair of Translational Cognitive Neuroscience. Nobre is a member of the British Academy, Academia Europaea, and National Academy of Sciences in the USA. In addition to the C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science, awards she has received include the MRC Suffrage Science Award, the Broadbent Prize, and the APS Mentor Award.

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The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded the C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science 2020 to Robert Zatorre, Professor of Neuroscience at McGill University in Canada and researcher at The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital). Zatorre is receiving the prize for his contribution to the discipline of music cognition. He studies how our nervous system ensures that we can make and enjoy music.

Zatorre sets the tone for scientific approach to music
Robert Zatorre has made ground-breaking discoveries about the way people perceive sound, especially speech and music, the most important modes of human communication. Understand­ing how our brain processes music and speech will teach us more about how the brain works. Zatorre is one of the pioneers in the field of music cognition.

Impact of music
In February this year, leading journal Science published Zatorre’s findings that the brain’s left hemisphere processes the lyrics of songs, while the right hemisphere registers the melody. Researchers have known for a long time that damage to the left hemisphere affects under­stand­ing of speech and that damage to the right hemisphere means that you can’t hear music properly. Zatorre’s group recently discovered why that is, using fMRI scans to show that each hemisphere is specialized for distinct acoustical features of sounds that are relevant for speech or music.

In another much-discussed series of studies, he and his students showed that the reward system in the brain is activated when people listen to emotional music. He subsequently discovered that when people listen to “emotional peak moments” in music — moments when they feel a “shiver of pleasure” — brain cells release the neurotransmitter dopamine.

The brain releases dopamine during behaviour that is essential for survival, such as eating, but also when listening to music, which is not in fact necessary for survival. Zatorre currently studies whether music can help us cope better with the stress caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Application of music processing
Zatorre took the lead in research in this field by combining the application of cognitive neuro­science with the study of music processing. He and his team have worked on the idea that musical training helps people to understand better what another person is saying (i.e. speech processing). He showed that musicians have a stronger coupling of auditory and motor areas than non musicians when processing speech, especially in noisy conditions. These findings might be relevant for alleviating speech perception problems (i.e. problems with processing what another speaker is saying). These problems are more often faced by the elderly and by people with hearing impairments.

About the laureate
Robert Jorge Zatorre was born in Buenos Aires in 1955 and studied psychology and music at Boston University. He also trained as an organist. He held a postdoc position at the Montreal Neurological Institute in Canada and worked as a neuropsychologist at the Montreal Neurological Hospital for several years. In 2006, together with Isabelle Peretz, he founded the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS) in Montreal. His lab is dedicated to the neuroscience of auditory cognition, especially music.

Zatorre has received various awards for his work, including the IPSEN Foundation Neuronal Plasticity Prize, the Hugh Knowles Prize, and the Oliver Sacks Award. He has been a member of the Royal Society of Canada since 2017.

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The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded the C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science 2018 to Nancy Kanwisher, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (USA).

A region of the brain specialising in facial recognition
Nancy Kanwisher received the C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science for her highly original, meticulous and cogent research on the functional organisation of the human brain.
Nancy Kanwisher is an exceptionally innovative and influential researcher in cognitive neuropsychology and the neurosciences.
Early in her career, she conducted behavioural research to study visual perception. One of her discoveries was that the short-term memory drops the second occurrence of a word in a sentence or a picture in a series of images.
Kanwisher was also one of the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to understand the functional organisation of the brain. Fellow researchers – even those who remain relatively sceptical about what fMRI scans really tell us – regard her work in this area as original, intelligent, meticulous, reproducible and cogent.
Her research is teaching us a great deal about the effects of such cognitive processes as attention and awareness. She has also localised areas of the brain that have highly specialised functions, for example perceiving places or images of the human body.
Her work has generated groundbreaking new insights into specialised brain regions and how they divide up tasks. Her discovery of the fusiform face area, a region that specialises in perceiving faces, was later confirmed in electrophysiological studies in non-human primates.
Much of Kanwisher’s work has found its way into cognitive neuroscience textbooks and it continues to influence the way researchers think about the functional organisation of the human brain. For example, it plays a role in a lively, longstanding scientific debate: is our brain mainly a holistic network, or does it consist of separate modules that perform highly local, specialised tasks?

Researcher
Nancy Kanwisher was born in Woods Hole (MA, USA) in 1958. After studying Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge (MA, USA), she was awarded a PhD in Cognitive Psychology by the same university in 1986.
In 1987, Kanwisher moved across Cambridge to join the faculty of Psychology at Harvard University. In 1988 she moved again, this time to the West Coast to take up positions at the University of California in Berkeley and Los Angeles. She returned to Cambridge in 1994. Since 2000, she has held positions at Massachusetts General Hospital, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and MIT.
Kanwisher is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has received various honours and awards, including the US National Academy of Sciences’ Troland Research Award (1999), the Minerva Foundation’s Golden Brain Award (2007) and the National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award.

Article
— Interview with Nancy Kanwisher in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

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The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded the C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science 2016 to Elizabeth Spelke, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University in Cambridge (United States).

The unexpected capacities of an infant’s brain
Elizabeth Spelke received the C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science for her pioneering research into the cognitive development of infants.
Her experiments and concepts have drastically altered our understanding of the mind. She demonstrated which parts of the human cognition are already naturally present at birth, which are learnt and when that takes place.
Spelke analysed what, how and when young children learn by studying how they gaze at the world. How do they distinguish social beings from inanimate objects? What is their understanding of numbers and quantities? How do they deal with place and time?
She discovered that the cognitive capacity of young children is larger than had long been assumed. She discovered signs that children have a universal system to process spatial information from a very early age. This system is similar to the one used by laboratory animals such as rats to get their bearings.
She studied how young children select social partners with whom they interact, cooperate and share. As a result, we have learnt more about fundamental processes such as social exclusion and interpersonal conflict.
An important concept in Spelke’s work is ‘core knowledge’: modules enclosed within the brain of every infant that help to recognise objects, as well as to navigate, count and communicate. Spelke argued that the core knowledge of humans is similar to that of animals, but that humans can develop much further because language enables children to link the separate knowledge modules.
This theory explains that although human cognition may be unique, it nevertheless fits within a broad evolutionary perspective. It has implications not only for upbringing, education and psychology, but also for philosophy, anthropology and artificial intelligence, et cetera.

Researcher
Elizabeth Spelke was born in 1949 in the United States. She gained her bachelor degree in social relations at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). She studied at Yale University in New Haven (Connecticut) before being awarded a PhD in psychology at Cornell University in Ithaca (New York).
After working for ten years at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, she returned to Cornell in 1986 as Professor of Psychology. In 1996 she returned to Cambridge, first to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, from 2001, to Harvard University. She has also held various guest positions in Paris and at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (Maryland).
Spelke is a member of the American National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has received many distinctions and prizes including the Distinguished Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the William James Award of the American Psychological Society, the Jean Nicod Prize of the École Normale Supérieure, the Kurt Koffka Medal of the University of Giessen (Germany) and the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences.

More information
— Elizabeth Spelke, Laboratory for Development Studies, Harvard University

Article
— Interview with Elizabeth Spelke in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

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The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) has awarded the C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science 2014 to professor James McClelland, Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Computation at the University of  Stanford (United States).
Professor McClelland received this award for his important and fundamental contributions to the use of neural networks to model cognitive processes of the brain.

Researcher
James (‘Jay’) McClelland was born in Cambridge (U.S.) on 1 December 1948. He studied at Columbia University in New York City and got his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1975.
The year before, McClelland had taken up a research position at the University of California at San Diego, while occasionally doing guest professorships at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (U.S.).
In 1984, McClelland transferred to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (U.S.). His seminal work Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, however, was published in 1986 together with David E. Rumelhart and other former colleagues from San Diego. Today, the book has been cited over 19,000 times.
McClelland became Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of  Stanford (U.S.) in 2006. He also leads Stanford’s Center for Mind, Brain, and Computation, which he has founded.
McClelland has received honorary doctorates from the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the New Bulgarian University in Sofia. He is member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and President of the Psychology Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Research
Up until the 80’s of the previous century, the human brain was often compared to a simple computer. Cognition scientists modelled the brain as a processor that retrieves information from a memory, performs calculations and saves the results to a memory once again.
By publishing a book that is now seen as seminal to the field, James McClelland and colleagues ended this era in 1986. More comprehensively than others before them, they presented a new, universal model for cognitive processing. They called it ‘parallel distributed processing’ (PDP). Right away they showed how such a model could be applied to a wide range of neuropsychological problems.
The PDP model, these days also known as ‘connectionism’, was not based on computer technology but rather on the complex biological structure of the brain. In the brain, countless nerve cells communicate continuously through constantly changing interconnections. This ‘neural network’ of nodes and changing connections carries out many calculations at the same time. It is able to ‘learn’ by strengthening or weakening particular connections. Information does not have to be stored at a particular location but may reside in the overall state of the network.
With their universal model, McClelland and his colleagues not just changed the way we visualize the brain. They also provided the field of cognitive science with a set of mathematical principles that could be applied to research. Using these principles, scientists could rephrase countless research questions as clear, testable hypotheses.
McClelland himself used his universal model to try and explain how our brains are capable of performing complex cognitive processes such as learning to understand words.
Today, McClelland is still an influential and effective advocate of the ‘parallel distributed processing’ concept. Thanks in part to his persistence and his persuasiveness, the once controversial model has become highly influential and has inspired a generation of scientists, not just in cognitive science but in psychology and other adjacent fields as well.

More information
— Personal page on website Stanford University
— James McClelland wins Heineken Prize (Stanford University)

Article
— Interview with James McClelland in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

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John Duncan has been awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science 2012 for his remarkable innovative, multidisciplinary research into the relationships between psychology, behaviour and intelligence on the one hand and neural processes on the other.
John Duncan is an all-round scientist whose work builds bridges between psychology and behavioural science on the one hand and neurobiology on the other.
Duncan’s multifaceted research encompasses everything from clinical observation to digital brain scans and electrophysiological measurements of individual nerve cells in animal brains. In essence, however, he concentrates on two crucial cognitive functions: our ability to focus our attention selectively on only the most important stimuli (selective attention), and our ability to adapt our thinking and actions to a changing environment (intelligence). At one time, only social scientists were interested in these phenomena. Thanks to multidisciplinary researchers like Duncan, however, they are now thriving areas of investigation in the neurosciences.
Duncan combines observations and theories drawn from a variety of different disciplines to produce innovative concepts that range from individual nerve cells to patterns of human behaviour, and that serve as a source of inspiration for many of his fellow scientists.
One such concept explains our ability to focus our attention selectively on specific visual stimuli and objects. In the 1980s, Duncan’s “biased competition” model united concepts taken from neurophysiology and psychology. In his view, stimuli compete for the brain’s attention, and those stimuli that best suit the task being carried out at that moment have an advantage over the rest. This concept is now regarded as one of the cornerstones of cognitive neuroscience and is used to study such phenomena as language, memory and emotion.
More recently, Duncan developed a new theory for how nerve cells in various multifunctional brain centres combine to produce intelligent behaviour. His theory is based in part on his observations of brain centres that are involved in a wide variety of different tasks. Together they form a “multiple-demand neural network” that gives one particular task precedence over another, depending on the situation. These networks may be capable of processing structured, abstract programs that lead to intelligent, goal-oriented behaviour.
Duncan has also designed a series of neurological tests capable of predicting a subject’s IQ under experimental conditions. The suggestion is that such tests may constitute a useful addition to traditional psychological intelligence testing. The tests also offer fascinating glimpses of potential new relationships between biological and artificial forms of intelligence.

Further reading
The Green Fluorescent Protein. Annual Review of Biochemistry 67 (1998) 507-544.
Griffin, B.A., Adams S.R. and Tsien R.Y., Specific Covalent labeling of Recombinant Protein Molecules Inside Live Cells. Science 281 (1998), 269.
Baird G.S., Zacharias D.A. and Tsien R.Y., Biochemistry, mutagenesis, and oligomerization of dsRed, a red fluorescent protein from coral. Proc.Natl.Acad.Sci. 97 (2000) 11984-11989.
Zacharias D.A., Baird G.S. and Tsien R.Y., Recent advances in technology for measuring and manipulating cell signals. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 10 (2000) 416-421.
Honda A., Adams S.R., Sawyer C.L., Lev-Ram V., Dostmann W.R.G. and Tsien R.Y., Spatiotemporal dynamics of guanosine 3′,5′-cyclic monophosphate revealed by a genetically encoded, fluorescent indicator. Proc.Natl.Acad.Sci.USA 98 (2001) 2437.

Biography
John Duncan studied psychology and physiology at Oxford University and obtained his DPhil from the same university in 1976. After a period as postdoc at the University of Oregon in Eugene (US), he returned to the UK in 1978 to become a researcher at the Medical Research Council (MRC) in Cambridge. His position was with the Applied Psychology Unit, an institute to which he has remained faithful ever since. He is now the Assistant Director of the unit, today known as the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.
Duncan is a highly respected scientist, as evidenced by the many articles he has published in such leading journals as Science, Nature and Nature Neuroscience. He is also well known for his ability to communicate the complexities of science to a wider audience. In 2010, he published How Intelligence Happens, in which he explains the implications for cognitive science of recent research in psychology, artificial intelligence, brain scanning and neurophysiology.
Among his many honours, John Duncan has been made a Fellow of the British Royal Society and the British Academy.

Laudatio
— English
— Dutch

Article
— Interview with John Duncan in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

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Professor Michael Tomasello was awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science 2010 because his multidisciplinary research has given us a much deeper understanding of cognitive processes in primates in general, and language acquisition processes in humans in particular.
According to Michael Tomasello, joint attention, or two individuals consciously focusing on one and the same action, is the structuring principle underlying many aspects of human communication and learning. Tomasello based this conclusion on extensive research. He is one of the few scientists worldwide who is acknowledged as an expert in multiple disciplines; his research interests range from cognitive processes in apes to developmental psychology and language acquisition in children. In Tomasello’s view, the basic difference between human beings and apes is that from infancy, humans are capable of something that apes are not, or in any event do less well: putting themselves in another’s position and knowing what the other is observing and thinking. Thanks to this unique ability, he argues, humans were able to develop a culture as part of their evolutionary process. The principle that people understand one another’s intentions also provides the basis for language acquisition, according to Tomasello. Children slowly learn the rules of grammar by communicating with the adults around them every day. Tomasello’s theory of usage-based linguistics rejects the theory of generative grammar, which assumes that children learn language owing to an innate universal grammar.
Although the jury is still out concerning the distinction between humans and apes and the way in which children learn language – and Tomasello would be the first to stress this – his original ideas, which are solidly grounded both theoretically and empirically, are generally considered to have made a major and innovative contribution to our understanding of cognitive processes.

Key publications
Tomasello M., Kruger A. & Ratner H. 1993. ‘Cultural Learning’. In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16: 495-552
Tomasello M. & Call J. 1997. Primate Cognition. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Tomasello M. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Harvard University Press, Harvard
Tomasello M. 2003. Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Harvard University Press, Harvard
Tomasello M. 2008. Origins of Human Communication. MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts

Biography
Michael Tomasello was born in Bartow, Florida, in 1950 and studied psychology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He received his doctorate in experimental psychology from the University of Georgia in Athens. He became professor of psychology and then of anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta. At the same time, Tomasello conducted psychobiological research at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. In 1998, he was appointed researcher and co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Three years later he became co-director of the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center, which cooperates with the Leipzig Zoo. Tomasello is an honorary professor in psychology at the universities of Leipzig and Manchester, UK. He has authored an impressive list of publications and has been a visiting scholar, professor and instructor at Harvard University, the University of Rome, Stanford University and UC Berkeley. His awards and distinctions include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997 and the Hegel Prize in 2009. In addition to his research achievements, Tomasello has reached out to a wider public in publications, lectures and television programs to explain how humans and apes (or dogs) are similar and how they differ.

Laudatio
— English
— Dutch

Article
— Interview with Michael Tomasello in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

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Stanislas Dehaene was awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science 2008 for his research into the higher cognitive processes, in particular numerical cognition.
Stanislas Dehaene has shown that the ability to estimate amounts — an innate ‘number sense’ that human beings have in common with various other species — forms the basis for our mathematical (abstract reasoning) and arithmetic (calculation) abilities. The latter ability does, however, require a well-developed system of symbols – a language system. Evidence for this duality has been found not only in scientific experiments but also in anthropological research. One example is the language of the Amazonian Mundurukú tribe, which has words for numbers only up to five. The Mundurukú are not able to perform precise calculations with larger numbers, but they can approximate and compare larger amounts.
Dehaene has also conducted important research into reading, the ultimate culturally-determined – and not inborn – skill. He has devised ingenious methods for showing that when we read, we access a complex network in the brain that recognises increasingly larger fragments of words without our being aware of it.
These and other findings have led Dehaene to develop the influential ‘global workspace’ theory of human consciousness, which proposes that our brain uses two different mechanisms in tandem to achieve consciousness.

Examples of key publications
Dehaene, S., The number sense: How the mind creates mathematics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997
Dehaene, S., Spelke, E., Pinel, P, Stanescu, R., Tsivkin, S., Sources of mathematical thinking: Behavioral and brain-imaging evidence. In: Science, 1999; 284: 970-974
Dehaene, S., Naccache, L., Cohen, L., Bihan, D.L., Mangin, J.F., Poline, J.B., Rivière, D., Cerebral mechanisms of word masking and unconscious repetition priming. In: Nature Neuroscience, 2001; 4: 752-758
Pica, P., Lemer, C., Izard, V., Dehaene, S., Exact and approximate arithmetic in an Amazonian indigene group. In: Science 2004; 306: 499-503
Dehaene-Lambertz, G., Hertz-Pannier, L., Dubois, J., Meriaux, S., Roche, A., Sigman, M., Dehaene, S., Functional organization of perisylvian activation during presentation of sentences in preverbal infants. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 2006; 103: 14240-14245.

Biography
Stanislas Dehaene was born in Roubaix, France, in 1965 and studied applied mathematics and information science in Paris (1985). In 1989 he obtained his PhD in the cognitive sciences. He became the youngest member of the French Academy of Science in 2005 and in the same year was elected to the chair in Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the prestigious Collège de France. Dehaene is also the Research Director of the Cognitive Neuro-imaging Unit at INSERM, the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research. His previous awards include the Louis D. Prize of the Institut de France and the Gold Medal of the Association Arts-Sciences-Lettres.
Dehaene’s work has been recognised well beyond his own discipline. His book The Number Sense is a success both within and outside the scientific community. Dehaene’s research has resulted in an interactive computer program that helps children with a congenital numeracy problem (dyscalculia) to understand numbers.

Laudatio
— English
— Dutch

Article
— Interview with Stanislas Dehaene in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

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Professor John R. Anderson was awarded the very first Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science 2006 for his ground-breaking theory of human cognition.
It was in around 1980 that psychologist John R. Anderson succeeded in developing the first theory integrating the various mechanisms and processes underlying intelligent behaviour. His ‘computational’ theory of human cognition, known as Adaptive Control of Thought (ACT), defines a number of elementary cognitive functions, such as ‘compare’, ‘choose’, and ‘do’. These functions are, in turn, part of more complex, cooperative modules, including one that responds to visual information as well as memory modules for declarative (‘know that’) and procedural (‘know how’) information. Anderson’s work has had an enormous impact on many different fields of research, ranging from neurocognition to decision making. It has been applied in behavioural research on attention, learning and problem solving, but ACT can also make accurate, verifiable predictions of the cognitive activity in the brain. Anderson’s theory has found application in the context of ergonomics and computer-assisted learning, for example in a much-praised and highly effective ‘math tutor’ that Anderson developed for school mathematics.

Further reading
Anderson, J.R., The architecture of cognition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983
Anderson, J.R., The adaptive character of thought, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1990
Anderson, J.R., Lebiere, C., The atomic components of thought, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1998
Anderson, J.R., Bothell, D., Byrne, M.D., Douglas, S., Lebiere, C., Qin, Y., An integrated theory of the mind, Psychological Review 111, 1030-1060, 2004
Anderson, J.R., Human symbol manipulation within an integrated cognitive architecture, Cognitive Science 29, 313-341, 2004

Biography
John Robert Anderson was born in Vancouver, Canada, in 1947. He is now an U.S. citizen. He received his B.A. from the University of British Columbia in 1968 and obtained his doctorate at Stanford University in 1972. After a number of brief appointments at Yale University and the University of Michigan, Anderson was appointed Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in 1978. In 1983 he accepted a second appointment as Professor of Computer Science. Since 2002 he has held the prestigious Richard King Mellon Chair of Psychology and Computer Science.
Anderson’s work has received widespread recognition right from the start of his career. He received the Early Career Award of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1978, the APA’s Distinguished Scientific Career Award in 1994, and the David E. Rumelhart Prize in 2004. In 1999 he was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, in the same year, he also became a member of the National Academy of Sciences acting as chair of its Psychology Section since 2001.
Anderson now has some three hundred publications to his name. He is an authoritative voice in public debates and has, for example, argued in favour of raising the scientific standards of educational research.

Laudatio
— English
— Dutch

Article
— Interview with John Anderson in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

Video