Max Coltheart

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Max Coltheart AM (born 16 April 1939) is an Australian cognitive scientist who specialises in cognitive neuropsychology and cognitive neuropsychiatry.

Coltheart was born in Frankston, Victoria and grew up in Brisbane, Canberra and Bega. He commenced a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Sydney in 1957, and completed MA and PhD degrees there, then went on to a succession of academic posts including at the University of Sydney, 1965-1967, Monash University, 1967-1969, University of Waterloo, Canada 1969-1972) and the University of London. He was Reader in Psychology at the University of Reading 1972-1975 and Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck College London University from 1975 to 1987. In 1987 he took up the position of Professor of Psychology in the Psychology Department of Macquarie University. [1]

Coltheart was appointed Scientific Director of the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science in 2000, and maintained this position until 2009. He was awarded an ARC Federation Fellowship in 2002 and in 2010 was appointed Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University. [1] He is also a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. [2] He is currently a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Cognition and its Disorders at Macquarie University. Among his prominent students is Anne Castles. [3]

He is noted for developing the "dual-route" theory of reading [4] ) in the late 1970s [5] and the two-factor theory of delusional belief in the 2000s [6] as well as contributions to the debate about what can be learned about cognition from functional neuroimaging work [7]

Coltheart received a Centenary Medal on 1 January 2001 "For service to Australian society and science in cognitive neuropsychology'. [8] He was appointed Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2010 Australia Day Honours "For service to cognitive psychology as a researcher and academic, and to people with learning difficulties". [8]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Index of psychology articles</span>

Psychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of human mental functions and behavior. Occasionally, in addition or opposition to employing the scientific method, it also relies on symbolic interpretation and critical analysis, although these traditions have tended to be less pronounced than in other social sciences, such as sociology. Psychologists study phenomena such as perception, cognition, emotion, personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships. Some, especially depth psychologists, also study the unconscious mind.

Philosophy of psychology is concerned with the philosophical foundations of the study of psychology. It deals with both epistemological and ontological issues and shares interests with other fields, including philosophy of mind and theoretical psychology. Philosophical and theoretical psychology are intimately tied and are therefore sometimes used interchangeably or used together. However, philosophy of psychology relies more on debates general to philosophy and on philosophical methods, whereas theoretical psychology draws on multiple areas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cognitive neuropsychology</span>

Cognitive neuropsychology is a branch of cognitive psychology that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relates to specific psychological processes. Cognitive psychology is the science that looks at how mental processes are responsible for our cognitive abilities to store and produce new memories, produce language, recognize people and objects, as well as our ability to reason and problem solve. Cognitive neuropsychology places a particular emphasis on studying the cognitive effects of brain injury or neurological illness with a view to inferring models of normal cognitive functioning. Evidence is based on case studies of individual brain damaged patients who show deficits in brain areas and from patients who exhibit double dissociations. Double dissociations involve two patients and two tasks. One patient is impaired at one task but normal on the other, while the other patient is normal on the first task and impaired on the other. For example, patient A would be poor at reading printed words while still being normal at understanding spoken words, while the patient B would be normal at understanding written words and be poor at understanding spoken words. Scientists can interpret this information to explain how there is a single cognitive module for word comprehension. From studies like these, researchers infer that different areas of the brain are highly specialised. Cognitive neuropsychology can be distinguished from cognitive neuroscience, which is also interested in brain damaged patients, but is particularly focused on uncovering the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive processes.

Cognitive neuropsychiatry is a growing multidisciplinary field arising out of cognitive psychology and neuropsychiatry that aims to understand mental illness and psychopathology in terms of models of normal psychological function. A concern with the neural substrates of impaired cognitive mechanisms links cognitive neuropsychiatry to the basic neuroscience. Alternatively, CNP provides a way of uncovering normal psychological processes by studying the effects of their change or impairment.

Neurophilosophy or philosophy of neuroscience is the interdisciplinary study of neuroscience and philosophy that explores the relevance of neuroscientific studies to the arguments traditionally categorized as philosophy of mind. The philosophy of neuroscience attempts to clarify neuroscientific methods and results using the conceptual rigor and methods of philosophy of science.

Mirrored-self misidentification is the delusional belief that one's reflection in the mirror is another person – typically a younger or second version of one's self, a stranger, or a relative. This delusion occurs most frequently in patients with dementia and an affected patient maintains the ability to recognize others' reflections in the mirror. It is caused by right hemisphere cranial dysfunction that results from traumatic brain injury, stroke, or general neurological illness. It is an example of a monothematic delusion, a condition in which all abnormal beliefs have one common theme, as opposed to a polythematic delusion, in which a variety of unrelated delusional beliefs exist. This delusion is also classified as one of the delusional misidentification syndromes (DMS). A patient with a DMS condition consistently misidentifies places, objects, persons, or events. DMS patients are not aware of their psychological condition, are resistant to correction and their conditions are associated with brain disease – particularly right hemisphere brain damage and dysfunction.

A monothematic delusion is a delusional state that concerns only one particular topic. This is contrasted by what is sometimes called multi-thematic or polythematic delusions where the person has a range of delusions. These disorders can occur within the context of schizophrenia or dementia or they can occur without any other signs of mental illness. When these disorders are found outside the context of mental illness, they are often caused by organic dysfunction as a result of traumatic brain injury, stroke, or neurological illness.

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Christopher Donald Frith, is a British psychologist and professor emeritus at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London. Visiting Professor at the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy and Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

Eleanor M. Saffran, an American neuroscientist, was a researcher in the field of Cognitive Neuropsychology. Her interest in Neuropsychology began at the Baltimore City hospitals of Johns Hopkins University, where her research unit focused on neurological patients with language or cognitive impairments. In papers published between 1976 and 1982, Dr. Saffran spelled out the methodological tenets of “cognitive neuropsychology” exemplified in her studies of aphasia, alexia, auditory verbal agnosia, and short-term memory impairment.

Stephen Crain is the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD), and a distinguished professor at Macquarie University in the Department of Linguistics. He is a well-known researcher specializing in language acquisition, focusing specifically on syntax and semantics. Crain views language acquisition as based on language-specific faculties, and he conducts his research in the tradition of Chomskyan generative grammar. Recently, Crain has proposed that language is based on a universal logical system, and he has begun to explore the neural correlates of language acquisition from a cross-linguistic perspective using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Crain received a BA in philosophy from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1971 and a PhD in cognitive science with an emphasis in linguistics from the University of California, Irvine in 1980. Crain was employed as a professor of linguistics at the University of Connecticut from 1986 to 1995. During that time he was also a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut. After leaving UConn, he took a position as professor of linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park, from 1995 to 2003, before accepting a position as a professor of cognitive science at Macquarie in 2004, where he has remained since. He was deputy director of the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science from 2004 until 2010, and director of the Centre for Language Sciences from 2007 until 2010. He led the successful bid for an ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, which is funded from 2011 until 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Basic science (psychology)</span> Subdisciplines within psychology

Some of the research that is conducted in the field of psychology is more "fundamental" than the research conducted in the applied psychological disciplines, and does not necessarily have a direct application. The subdisciplines within psychology that can be thought to reflect a basic-science orientation include biological psychology, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and so on. Research in these subdisciplines is characterized by methodological rigor. The concern of psychology as a basic science is in understanding the laws and processes that underlie behavior, cognition, and emotion. Psychology as a basic science provides a foundation for applied psychology. Applied psychology, by contrast, involves the application of psychological principles and theories yielded up by the basic psychological sciences; these applications are aimed at overcoming problems or promoting well-being in areas such as mental and physical health and education.

In psychology, confabulation is a memory error defined as the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world. It is generally associated with certain types of brain damage or a specific subset of dementias. While still an area of ongoing research, the basal forebrain is implicated in the phenomenon of confabulation. People who confabulate present with incorrect memories ranging from subtle inaccuracies to surreal fabrications, and may include confusion or distortion in the temporal framing of memories. In general, they are very confident about their recollections, even when challenged with contradictory evidence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dual-route hypothesis to reading aloud</span>

The dual-route theory of reading aloud was first described in the early 1970s. This theory suggests that two separate mental mechanisms, or cognitive routes, are involved in reading aloud, with output of both mechanisms contributing to the pronunciation of a written stimulus.

Anne Castles is a cognitive scientist of reading and language, with a particular focus on reading development and developmental dyslexia.

Professor Susan Rossell is a British researcher based at Swinburne University of Technology specialising in Neuropsychology and Neuroimaging. Originally from Nottingham, UK; she now resides in Melbourne, Australia. Her research on the neuropsychology of schizophrenia and body dysmorphic disorder is internationally recognised.

Covert facial recognition is the unconscious recognition of familiar faces by people with prosopagnosia. The individuals who express this phenomenon are unaware that they are recognizing the faces of people they have seen before.

Randi Martin is the Elma Schneider Professor of Psychology at Rice University and Director of the T. L. L. Temple Foundation Neuroplasticity Research Laboratory. With Suparna Rajaram and Judith Kroll, Martin co-founded Women in Cognitive Science in 2001, an organization supported in part through the National Science Foundation's ADVANCE Leadership program. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Society of Experimental Psychologists (SEP).

Kate Nation is an experimental psychologist and expert on language and literacy development in school age children. She is Professor of Experimental Psychology and Fellow of St. John's College of the University of Oxford, where she directs the ReadOxford project and the Language and Cognitive Development Research Group.

Philipp Kanske is a German psychologist and neuroscientist. He is professor at Technische Universität Dresden. His research focuses on the neuronal foundations of emotion, emotion regulation and emotion understanding, as well as their changes in mental disorders. Philipp Kanske is speaker of the Junge Akademie.

Kathleen Rastle is a cognitive psychologist and Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London where she was previously the Head of Department of Psychology (2015-2019). Her research has made fundamental contributions to understanding of reading and learning to read.

References

  1. 1 2 Macquarie University Faculty of Human Sciences Department of Cognitive Science Department Members, Max Coltheart
  2. ↑ "Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia". Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. Retrieved 30 March 2015.
  3. ↑ New ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders Archived 2 April 2015 at the Wayback Machine Macquarie University News and Events
  4. ↑ [Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C., Langdon, R., & Ziegler, J. (2001). DRC: A Dual Route Cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. Psychological Review, 108, 204 – 256
  5. ↑ Pritchard SC, Coltheart M, Palethorpe S, Castles A (October 2012). "Nonword reading: comparing dual-route cascaded and connectionist dual-process models with human data". J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 38 (5): 1268–88. doi:10.1037/a0026703. PMID   22309087.
  6. ↑ Coltheart, M., Langdon, R. & McKay, R.T. (2011). Delusional belief. Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 271-298.
  7. ↑ Coltheart, M. (2013). How can functional neuroimaging inform cognitive theories? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8, 98-103
  8. 1 2 "COLTHEART, Max". Australian Honours Search Facility, Dept of Prime Minister & Cabinet. Retrieved 16 March 2018.
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