| Originally from
Romania, Morris Moscovitch was inspired during his undergraduate
years at McGill University by the case of the well-known amnesic,
H. M., to go on to a career in neuropsychology. After completing
a BSc at McGill, Professor Moscovitch went on to earn his PhD
at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Paul
Rozin. His dissertation was entitled "Reaction-time studies
assessing the verbal behaviour of the minor hemisphere in normal,
right-handed, adult humans (or what does someone in his right
mind know?). He then began a long and productive affiliation with
the University of Toronto where he is now the Max and Gianna Glassman
Chair in Neuropsychology and Aging. Early in his career, Professor
Moscovitch held a Medical Research Council Fellowship in Brenda
Milner's laboratory at the Montreal Neurological Institute. His
clinical neuropsychology interests led to a position in 1986 as
consultant in Psychology at the Baycrest Geriatric Hospital in
Toronto where he was later appointed senior scientist to the then
new Rotman Research Institute--an institution dedicated to research
on behavourial changes associated with aging.
Professor Moscovitch began his
research career investigating lateralized hemispheric brain function
at a time when cognition was barely acknowledged to involve the
brain. He was poised to make significant contributions as the
constraints imposed by the brain on cognitive organization became
increasingly apparent. The 1990's saw an explosive interest in
neuropsychology as a means of determining the modularity of cognitive
processing and Professor Moscovitch has made fundamental contributions
to that enterprise. His research program examines the brain mechanisms
that mediate memory, attention, and the recognition of objects
and faces. His work is guided by a neuropsychological model of
memory founded on three principles: (1) the posterior neocortex
mediates influences of memory that operate outside awareness,
(2) the medial temporal lobes automatically store consciously
perceived events and recover information about those events through
cue-driven conscious recollection, and (3) the frontal lobes use
memories from medial temporal lobes and posterior neocortex to
guide strategic processes that underlie encoding and retrieval
processes. Professor Moscovitch's research uses selective and
divided attention behavioral tasks in conjunction with memory
paradigms and neuroimaging techniques to investigate normal and
neurologically impaired memory processes. He has published widely
on topics related to memory and visual cognition from three perspectives:
basic processes, normal aging, and neurological impairment. Professor
Moscovitch has also done collaborative work using non-human species,
particularly to examine the effects of controlled hippocampal
lesions. His research has had a tremendous impact on the field:
he has published over 150 articles; more than 100 of these have
been cited at least 20 times each, and 20 have been cited over
100 times each. His work has appeared in such prestigious publications
as Science, Nature, Nature Neuroscience, and Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences. Professor Moscovitch's research
has been funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research
Council, the Medical Research Council, the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council, the Ontario Mental Health Foundation,
the McDonnell-Pew Foundation, the Canadian Institutes of Health
Research, and the Alzheimer's Society of Canada.
Professor Moscovitch has also
contributed to the field through profession service, currently
as editor of Neuropsychologia, and he has served on the editorial
boards of nine other journals.
He has been a generous and prolific graduate mentor, supervising
more than 20 PhD students, among them professors Marlene Behrmann
(Carnegie Mellon University) Patricia Reuter-Lorenz (University
of Michigan), and Esther Strauss (University of Victoria). University
of Toronto psychology graduate students acknowledged his gift
for supervision in awarding him the Psychology Graduate Students'
Association Most Valuable Professor award in 2003. Professor Moscovitch's
contributions to the field have be recognized by his election
as Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association,
and the Canadian Psychological Association. In 2003, the British
Experimental Psychology Society invited him to give their Thirty-First
Bartlett Lecture.
Professor Moscovitch's approach
to the study of cognition embodies Hebb's notion that behaviour
seen in clinical settings should inform research. Models of normal
cognition resulting from this work ought reciprocally to inform
the rehabilitation of impaired cognition due to brain damage.
Morris Moscovitch's career is a stellar example of this synergy.
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