| A graduate of
McGill University (B.Sc.) and Harvard University (Ph.D.) Pierre
Jolicœur is world-renowned for his pioneering empirical work
and theoretical development in fundamental areas of human experimental
psychology. His internationally acclaimed discoveries at the intersection
of research on attention, memory, and perception over the last
25 years have profoundly influenced scientific development in
each of these areas.
Early in his career, Jolicœur
provided the empirical foundations for the study of basic visual
routines, using psychophysical and chronometric techniques. He
published the seminal papers on curve tracing and on the perception
of inside-outside relations. This work established the feasibility
of the study of basic visual operations in human observers, and
has enabled the study of basic visual routines. Not incidentally,
these experiments have paved the way for major later developments
in neurophysiological investigations. For example, Lamme and Roelfsema
in the Netherlands now study curve tracing at the single-cell
level in area V1 of the primate brain.
Jolicœur's research has been
just as influential in the field of visual search, wherein observers
are required to identify a target object hidden among distractors.
Perhaps the principal contribution was the systematic exploration
of the principle of “linear separability.” The target
object is found easily and quickly if it differs from the distractors
on all relevant underlying features. In contrast, a slow and effortful
search is required if the features of the target are not linearly
separable from the features of the distractors.
More recently, Jolicœur has
challenged the claimed effortlessness and automaticity of the
processes that encode information into short-term memory. In a
series of related articles Jolicœur demonstrated that encoding
information into short-term memory requires central processing
capacity. He called the process that performs this encoding short-term
"consolidation". The importance of this work is that
it provides clear-cut demonstrations of the capacity limitations
on short-term consolidation and provides the field with effective
new techniques for studying these limitations. This aspect of
Jolicœur's research provides foundational knowledge toward
an understanding of human thought and consciousness.
Never happy to rest on his laurels,
Jolicœur's current research programme is energetically incorporating
state-of-the-art developments in human electrophysiology, magnetoencephalography,
and fMRI, to study heretofore uncharted relationships between
spatial selective attention, visual short-term memory, and central
attention, at the functional and neural levels. In several recent
articles, Jolicœur has used the event-related potential technique
with human electrophysiological recordings to show that the attentional
blink impairs the deployment of visual spatial attention to visual
targets presented in the periphery, and also impairs the transfer
of information into visual short-term memory. Other recent work
shows that the deployment of spatial attention is also impaired
during the psychological refractory period. Just as important,
this work shows for the first time that the transfer to visual
short-term memory is delayed by concurrent central processing
of a cross-modal stimulus. Both sets of findings challenge the
widely-held view that spatial attention is independent of central
attention. This groundbreaking work constitutes a major advance
in our understanding of the brain mechanisms that govern attention
and attentional control.
Beyond his many scientific contributions,
Jolicœur has contributed significantly to the training of
what NSERC refers to as “highly-qualified personnel”,
notably graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. Many are
now university-based academics with active research projects of
their own. Here is a partial list of former graduate students
and post-doctoral fellows: Karen Arnell (Brock), Ben Bauer (Trent),
Roberto Dell’Acqua (Padova), Peter McCormick (St. Francis
Xavier), Bruce Milliken (McMaster), Chris Oriet (Regina), Eyal
Reingold (U of T), Eric Richards (U PEI), Biljana Stevanovski
(New Brunswick), and Mark Van Selst (San Jose State). But the
appointments have not been limited to academia. Two of Jolicœur's
former Ph.D. students have worked at the Defense and Civil Institute
of Environmental Medicine (Toronto --- now called DRDC - Defense
R&D Canada), where they applied the principles discovered
in Jolicœur's laboratory. One of them is still doing this
work; the other moved to Nortel Networks, where he applied his
research skills to the domain of auditory perception in the context
of wireless communication systems.
Jolicœur has served the academic
community unselfishly in many capacities. He was President of
the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science,
and served on the executive board of the society for 3 years.
He has served on the editorial boards of several leading scientific
journals. He served on the NSERC Grant Selection Committee for
Psychology, and has recently accepted an invitation to serve on
the Advisory Council of the International Association for the
Study of Attention and Performance. For almost a decade, he served
as Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology,
the leading Canadian journal for the scientific study of basic
mechanisms of perception, cognition, and attention. He is currently
Associate Director of CERNEC (Centre de recherche en neuropsychologie
et cognition), a dynamic and highly successful research group
at the Université de Montréal. As Director of the
MEG laboratory at the Université de Montréal, he
is facilitating access to this state-of-the-art facility for numerous
colleagues and students at the Université of Montréal
and at other research institutions in Canada. He has also organized
several scientific meetings, including meetings of the Lake Ontario
Visionary Establishment conference, the annual meeting of the
Société Québécoise pour la Recherche
en Psychology (2003), and the meeting of the Canadian Society
for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science, which was held at
the Université de Montréal in 2005.
In summary, Pierre Jolicœur
is an outstanding scientist whose groundbreaking discoveries have
led to widespread national and international recognition. Throughout
his career, Jolicœur has also made sustained contributions
to scientific training and education. His achievements have recently
been recognized by an appointment at the Université de
Montréal, as Professeur Titulaire and holder of the Canada
Research Chair in Experimental Cognitive Science. He is a Fellow
of the Royal Society of Canada. In all respects, he is an outstanding
recipient of the BBCS Hebb Award.
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