Michael Posner (psychologist)

Education and career

In 1957, Posner received his BS in physics and in 1959, his MS in psychology from the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. In 1962, he received his PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Posner joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin as an assistant professor of psychology. In 1968, he joined the faculty of the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon as an associate professor of psychology. He retired from teaching at Oregon in 2000 with the rank of emeritus professor. In 2003, Posner founded and became coordinator of the Brain, Biology and Machine Initiative at the University of Oregon.

Posner studied the role of attention in high-level human tasks such as visual search, reading, and number processing. More recently he investigated the development of attentional networks in infants and young children. A test of an individual's capability to perform attentional shift was formulated by him and bears his name—the Posner cueing task.

In Chronometric Explorations of Mind, published in 1976, Posner applied the subtractive method proposed 110 years earlier by Franciscus Donders to the study of several cognitive functions such as attention and memory. The subtractive method is based on the assumption that mental operations can be measured by decomposing complex cognitive tasks in sequences of simpler tasks. The method assumes that the effect of each mental operation is additive and that it is possible to isolate the effect of a single mental operation by comparing two tasks that differ only by the presence or absence of that mental operation. (See Mental chronometry for additional information on Donders' experiment.)

Posner applied the same subtractive principle to the study of attentional networks using PET (Positron Emission Tomography), a neuroimaging technique that produces three-dimensional functional maps of the brain. In Images of Mind, published with Marcus Raichle in 1994, Posner investigated brain localization of cognitive functions by looking at the patterns of brain activation in progressively more complex cognitive tasks. Posner won the 2001 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology, along with Marcus Raichle and Steven Petersen.

In 2005, the American Psychological Association published an edited volume in tribute to Posner's work. As reported by Steven W. Keele and Ulrich Mayr in that volume, "In May 2003, 10 speakers and a large audience gathered at the University of Oregon in Eugene to pay tribute to the enormously influential contributions Michael Posner has made to the disciplines of psychology and cognitive neuroscience."